What is antivirus database?
Antivirus database is the most important component of any antivirus. One may say that's its heart: if the antivirus doesn't have the most recent antivirus database, it becomes absolutely useless.
That's why every self-respecting antivirus software producer will first of all take care of relevancy and constant updating of their antivirus databases. Almost all such updates are free of charge: the user can download them automatically or manually.
In case the automatic updating of antivirus database is impossible for some reason, the user can download the latest database updates in zip-archives and install them on his computer without any troubles.
So what is antivirus database?
Antivirus database is the information about all known viruses, methods of their search and neutralization.
Constant viruses monitoring is necessary to create such database, since viruses appear very often, one might say every day. Special networks are used to gather all information on a virus.
After all information on the virus has been gathered, they start to analyze: what is the code of this virus, how it behaves… On the ground of this analysis the methods of fighting the virus are set.
Infected antivirus
There's a possibility that your antivirus may be infected itself and may cause the infection of other programs and files. That's why modern antiviruses can protect the files from all kinds of interference: antivirus files are checked for integrity using special algorithm.
Viruses are developed and become more sophisticated; however the methods of fighting them also get more complicated. Previously, viruses often ran together with operating system and one could get rid of them easily by removing the virus launch bar from the register. However more up-to-date viruses can not only infect a file, but also make the whole operating system of your computer vulnerable and out of order. Furthermore, the virus can also "steal" all your private data and pass them to strangers.
Complex viruses, taking hundreds of kilobytes and even several megabytes, are written now on the high-level programming languages that's why they can be easily stopped. The most important thing is to use license (even free) antivirus: very often pirated software has malicious code, so the user not only loses his money buying it, but also greatly threatens the system.
Each system has certain weak points, which are successfully used by the virus developers to attack the computers that don't have antivirus databases updated enough. Thus, by installing antivirus software on your computer, make sure is has the feature of automatic update. Most of modern antiviruses update their bases almost every hour (surely once a day), thereby making it possible to resist any virus attack.