title: Virus hunting
abstract: We all appreciate the need for, and hopefully we have all deployed, anti-virus software. The good news is that AV software has come a long way fast. Four or so years ago it was true to write that AV software could not detect Trojan Horses and similar intrusion attempts. Now it can and does. McAfee's VirusScan, for example, goes one further; it detects viruses, worms and Trojan Horses and deploys itself as a firewall to filter data packets, control access to Internet resources, activate rule sets for specific applications, in general to protect against hackers. But like so much software, we use it with little thought as to how it came to do its job. Behind the scenes there is an army of top notch programmers trying to stay ahead of the baddies who, at the last count, had produced some 60,000 viruses
keyphrases: anti-virus software Trojan Horses worms programmers