History

History
There are competing claims for the innovator of the first antivirus product. Perhaps the first publicly-known neutralization of a wild PC virus was performed by Bernt Fix (also Bernd) in early 1987. Fix neutralized an infection of the Vienna virus.[1] [2] The first edition of a antivirus program to detect and repair the cipap mks_vir was released in 1987; the program was only available with a Polish interface. Autumn 1988 saw antivirus software Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit released by Briton Alan Solomon. Also in 1988 AIDSTEST and AntiVir were released. By December 1990, the market had matured to the point of nineteen separate antivirus products being on sale including Norton AntiVirus and VirusScan from McAfee.
Peter Tippett made a number of contributions to the budding field of virus detection.[3] He was an emergency-room doctor who also ran a computer software company. He had read an article about the Lehigh virus and questioned whether, from an epidemiological viewpoint, they would have similar characteristics to biological viruses that attack organisms. The IBM compatible computers had various vulnerabilities. The boot sector was affected by the Brain virus, and within IBM DOS and MS-DOS, executable files, with either EXE filename extension or COM file extension, were affected by the Jerusalem virus) and the Lehigh virus specifically targeted .com files. Tippett’s company Certus International Corp. then began to sell anti-virus software programs. The company was sold in 1992 to Symantec Corp, and Tippett went to work for them, incorporating the software he had developed into Symantec’s product, Norton AntiVirus
Before Internet connectivity was widespread, viruses were typically spread by infected floppy disks; antivirus software started to be used, but was updated relatively infrequently. At that time it was said, correctly, that viruses could not be spread by the readable content of emails, although executable attachments were as risky as programs on floppy disks. Virus checkers essentially had to check executable files, and the boot sectors of floppy and hard disks. As Internet usage became common, initially by making a modem connection when desired, viruses spread through the Internet.
Powerful macros in word processors such as Microsoft Word presented a further risk. Virus writers started using the macros to write viruses that attached themselves to documents; this meant that computers could now also be at risk from infection by documents (with hidden attached macros) as programs. Later email programs, in particular Microsoft Outlook Express and Outlook, became able to execute program code from within a message's text by simply reading the message, or even previewing its content. Virus checkers now had to check many more types of file. As broadband always-on connections became the norm and more and more viruses were released, it became essential to update virus checkers more and more frequently; even then, a new virus could spread widely before it was detected, identified, a checker update released, and virus checkers round the world updated.
A very uncommon use of the term "antivirus" is to apply it to benign viruses that spread and combated malicious viruses. This was common on the Amiga computer platform
Sourece : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software#Security_Concept

Posted in: antivirus