How Does Antivirus Software Actually Work? Antivirus software acts as a defense from trojans, viruses, ransomware, spyware, adware, and much more. There are 3 main ways that it detects malware: signature-based detection, heuristic-based detection, and anomaly-based detection. Signature-Based Detection The scanner will search for specific strings in a program and check for them in a database of known viruses. The strings are often the payload of the malicious code. If the signatures match, th...
