Antivirus Installation Options

The most common way that antivirus programs are uploaded onto a user’s electronic device is by a full installation. This means the user installs the antivirus program on their electronic device and a full copy

of the antivirus is stored on the user’s hard disk.

 There are however other antivirus installation options available when it comes to the security of your electronic device:

Cloud Antivirus

Instead of installing a full copy of the antivirus program on your device, with a cloud antivirus program only a few core files and a user interface is installed. When a device needs to be scanned for malware, the files being scanned are sent to a remote host that does all the scanning for you.

This way most of the actual processing and scanning are done on “the cloud,” freeing up processing power and memory on the user’s device. One of the big advantages of using a cloud antivirus is that the network cloud hosts can use numerous types of detection techniques to scan your files for malware. For a cloud antivirus program to be most effective you need a constant network connection.

Online Scanning

Some antivirus vendors don’t need you to install an antivirus program at all. The requested files are uploaded via the antivirus vendor’s website, scanned for malware and a report is generated if anything is found.

This process is highly effective if you suspect that malware may already be prevalent on your device. Certain malware can effectively detect that an antivirus is being installed and either hide from the antivirus or even infect the antivirus programs themselves.

Online scanning can however be VERY DANGEROUS. There have been many fake antivirus programs offering free system scans however they in fact install malware on your system (See Rogue Security Software for more details). If you do decide to use an online scanning service be sure that it is from a trusted source (Preferably directly from a major vendor’s official website).

Rescue Disk

A rescue disk is loaded onto a CD/DVD or USB memory device and allows you to scan your system before the operating system loads into memory. This is extremely useful if malware has already done damage to your system and the operating system won’t load when you turn the device on, as well as removing malware that may be corrupting or deleting another antivirus program that you are trying to install.

Article Derivative Source – Wikipedia/Antivirus Software

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