Who are the Players in the Antivirus Industry?

Everyone in the United States has heard of the leading antivirus vendors Symantec, Mcafee, Computer Associates, and Trend Micro. These companies have market-leading presence in the United States. Microsoft, as well, has plans become a key player in this market. Microsoft acquired intellectual property and technology from GeCad software in 2003, a company based in Bucharest, Romania. They also acquired Pelican Software, which had a behavior based security as well as Giant Company Software for spyware and Sybari Software, which manages virus, spam, and phishing filtering.

A lot of discussion has centered on whether Microsoft with come to own a dominant position in the antivirus market by simply bundling its technologies with its operating systems at no charge. This is a similar technique applied in other markets such as word processing and Internet browsers.

Of course there are a number of antivirus vendors who also play in this market. There are many companies with great market presence in other countries that are beginning to become more widely known. These vendors include GriSoft out of the Czech Republic, Sophos in the united Kingdom, Panda Software out of Spain, Kaspersky in Russia, SoftWin in Romania, F-Secure in Finland, Norman in Norway, Arcabit in Poland, VirusBuster out of Hungary, and AhnLab in South Korea.

It is not clear where the industry is heading and everyone in this market faces a rapidly changing landscape. The amount of effort to find and provide fixes for viruses is staggering. Malicious programs are getting more complex and the number of them is increasing. Many companies may find themselves without the resources to match the efforts of those truly bent on creating havoc. Some virus companies are getting of hundreds of new samples a day! Moreover, the new viruses are getting "smarter" in that they propagate themselves quickly and they often hide themselves and are smart enough to move around in a system by renaming themselves in an effort to make it hard to remove them.

Fighting off Viruses: Advancements in Antivirus Software Suites

Protecting your computer from a virus is getting harder and harder each day. While it may border on the paranoid, it goes without saying that you can’t leave your guard down for one second. Even corporate giant Microsoft has found its own systems compromised on more than one occasion.

Remember the “good old days”, before the advent of the Internet and downloadable programs? Life was simple then in terms of computer viruses. With the primary way in which a virus could be transmitted being limited to floppy disks, the ability to catch and eradicate the virus was a lot easier. By today’s standards, it used to take quite a while before a virus was able to infect a computer and slow down the system. The antivirus software of that time was typically able to identify and eradicate viruses before they caused too much damage. Additionally, computer users were pretty savvy on how to protect themselves in terms of scanning all floppy disks before copying them to our desktop.

The Internet helped change all that. The Internet provided a conduit by which viruses could move from host to host with lightening speed. No longer could a computer user just worry about floppy disks as points of entry, but they now had to worry about email, email attachments, peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, and software downloads. Today’s viruses can attack through multiple entry points, spread without human intervention, and take full advantage of vulnerabilities within a system or program. With technology advancing everyday, and the convergence of computers with other mobile devices, the potential of new types of threats also increase.

General Troubleshooting Techniques

Many people will probably come to this Troubleshooting Guide looking for the answer to a specific problem that they are having with their PC. The Troubleshooting Experts can often help with this. However it is worthwhile if you are having a problem to read first the general troubleshooting information in this chapter. Using it you may be able to not only solve your current problem, but also develop your own skill as a troubleshooter so you can correct future problems more easily and quickly.

Troubleshooting and Your Mental State

Very few people seem to understand how incredibly important the mental state is of the person who is attempting to troubleshoot a system. I have personally seen many times (and often with myself as the subject) the difference between a person in the right mental state and one who is not, in the ability to identify and correct system problems. It can easily be the difference between a problem that is fixed in minutes and one that languishes for hours or days.

I would urge all troubleshooters to read this section and keep these rules of thumb in mind as you try to work out your PC problems. If you get stuck, come back and refer to them again. You may be surprised how much just thinking about the problem the right way can make it much easier to solve.

Don't Panic or Overestimate the Magnitude of the Problem

Probably the most important single thing to keep in mind when you find a problem with your PC is not to panic. Being in "panic mode" makes it extremely difficult for you to work on solving the problem, and in many cases the panic will turn out to be unwarranted anyway. Remember that most PC problems do not have to be solved with a clock ticking away in the background; this isn't a time bomb you are dealing with and if it is easier to turn off the PC and deal with the problem later, do so.

In fact, there are many problems with PCs that appear to be very serious but in fact are not. It isn't always possible to tell at the beginning how serious a problem is just by its outward symptoms. For example, there are some problems that can manifest themselves with your hard disk appearing to be crashed and all of its data lost. Sometimes real crashes do occur, but there are other problems that can cause a disk to appear crashed when really the problem is simple and can be fixed in a matter of a few minutes.