Lets take a look at obtaining offline signatures with a few of the popular brands: Keeping these updated allows your antivirus software to catch the latest viruses and worms. They also look for suspicious behavior, such as attempts to erase or change areas on your hard disks. And if you have a couple other computers at home you probably want to keep them updated too.ĭefinitions (or signatures, as they’re correctly known) are used to scan your hard disk for characteristic strings of base code left by known viruses. It can download quickly on the slowest connection, as some viruses and worms are just a few kilobytes in size.
Malicious code does not care about the speed of your internet connection. As I live in a rural part of the parish of Manchester, Jamaica I get by using a GPRS modem to connect to the Internet, and I know many people also don’t have the fastest connections. If you are in a situation where your internet connection is not reliable but you would like to keep your Antivirus utility updated, you may want to manually download your antivirus definitions.
