Suspicious behavior monitoring

The suspicious behavior approach, by contrast, does not attempt to identify known viruses, but instead monitors the behavior of all programs. If one program tries to write data to an executable program, for example, the antivirus software can flag this suspicious behavior, alert a user, and ask what to do.
Unlike the signature based approach, the suspicious behavior approach therefore provides protection against brand-new viruses that do not yet exist in any virus dictionaries. However, it can also sound a large number of false positives, and users may become desensitized to the warnings. If the user clicks "Accept" on every such warning, then the antivirus software obviously gives no benefit to that user. This problem has worsened since 1997[citation needed], since many more non-malicious program designs came to modify other .exe files without regard to this false positive issue. In recent years, however, sophisticated behavior analysis has emerged, which analyzes processes and calls to the kernel in context before making a decision, which gives it a lower false positive rate than rules based behavior monitoring.
Sourece : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software#Security_Concept

Posted in: antivirus