10 Things any Good Antivirus Must Be Able To Do

10 Things any Good Antivirus Must Be Able To Do

You can find an incredibly large amount of antivirus services on the Internet. All of them promise a reliable protection for your website. But the question is – Can they really deliver? Most of the antivirus services will ask you to enter a link into a designated box in order to check your website. Then the systems will scan the pages of your website for malicious code, redirects and other suspicious code and will than issue a report with the findings.

On the one hand, it seems to be a quick and simple way to check your website with no extra headache. But the headache will undoubtedly come when you’ll find yourself repairing your damaged website because those services, although better than nothing, can’t find hacker’s shells, backdoors, spam bots and other scripts that are hidden.

That’s why it is important to know which abilities should a good antivirus program have and why.

1. Static and dynamic scan of all pages

Viruses are not just fixed injections that were put into a code. The virus may also be an insertion that appear episodically or only when the infected website is shown in a specific browser. Or when the user finds the website through a search engine and many other different variations.

A good antivirus must have a built in function that will allow the system to emulate any browser and every possible interaction with the website to simulate every situation that may occur. Also, an antivirus must check the code for any changes, navigate through the website and scan every page after it was loaded. Only by performing a thorough scan can you be sure that your website is clean.

2. Up to date database and actual signatures

Signatures are getting outdated almost in a blink of an eye. And developers come up with new viruses constantly. That’s why every antivirus should care about the information it is working with and use several indicators of a malicious code.

3. Uploaded file scan

Virus may be placed not only on the HTML page, but in the uploaded scripts as well. And because scripts may be uploaded both from the website’s domain and also from external services the antivirus scanner must be able to check dynamically loadable files (scripts,styles, flash objects), to provide you with a decent scan.

4. Detecting malicious content from dangerous websites

User can infect a mobile device or a computer just by downloading a picture from a website that distributes malicious content. A good antivirus must be able to restrict access to web resources that distribute scripts, styles, images etc.

5. Blacklist check

The antivirus must perform blacklists checks to ensure that your website is not on any of them. And if your website managed to get on one of those lists then, you definitely have a problem with your website’s security.

6. Spam content and external links detection

Hackers crawling into your system and embedding it with spam content any good antivirus program must be able to check your website for external links and Spam

7. Dangerous widgets and unscrupulous advertisement detection

Webmasters and website owners usually don’t even know that a widget they placed can harm them. And hackers frequently leave an ad code to promote suspicious programs with hidden redirects.

8. Differ a real malicious object from a harmless one

It can be annoying when an antivirus screams every time it finds any iframe insertion even when it is not malicious. Antivirus must be able to determine if the object found is harmless or not.

9. Differ critical threats from warnings

Continuing our previous point, it should be said that an antivirus program must be able to differ threats from warnings. It will minimise the amount of false alarms and make the diagnosis more meticulous.

10. Save the results

The antivirus program must allow you to with a link where those saved results can be found. If a website owner can’t understand what to do with the results the antivirus gave him, he should have the ability to send them to a specialists.

As you can see, there are a lot of requirements and not every antivirus can meet all of them. With the CWIS antivirus you can be sure that your website will always thoroughly check your website and will never let you down.