What Is Antivirus?
Antivirus is a piece of software designed to protect computers and laptops (and often also mobile devices) from malware. Malware – or malicious software – is code that can harm your device, steal data, slow down your system, and more. It can get on your device through a malicious attachment in an email, by plugging in a USB drive, by visiting a shady website, or in other ways.
The best antivirus software will have a combination of detection methods to find and remove threats quickly, with minimum disruption. These include specific detection, which looks for parts or types of known viruses; generic detection, which identifies patterns associated with certain types of malware; and heuristic detection, which identifies suspicious file structures. Antivirus programs will usually scan your files and directories automatically on a scheduled basis, and will eliminate threats it detects – either automatically in the background or by alerting and prompting you to clean them up.
The threat landscape is constantly changing, so the best antivirus tools will be updated regularly to keep up with new malware variants. Some products will also use cloud integration to leverage real-time threat intelligence systems for faster responses. And some advanced antivirus solutions will combine heuristics and behavioural analysis with AI and machine learning to provide more proactive protection against modern attacks. FortiEDR is a powerful tool that goes beyond traditional antivirus to protect enterprises from complex cyber threats and breaches by actively reducing the attack surface, identifying and neutralizing vulnerabilities, and automating response and remediation through customizable playbooks.