McAfee Antivirus: Will It Really Protect Your Computer From CTV’s?

A Computer Transmitted Virus, or CTV, is very common to get in this day and age. In computer security, a computer virus is a self replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an infection, and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a host. Viruses are one of the several types of malicious software or malware. In common parlance, the term virus is often extended to refer to worms, trojan horses and other sorts of malware; viruses in the narrow sense of the word are less common than they used to be, compared to other forms of malware.

McAfee, Inc. is an anti virus and computer security company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It markets McAfee VirusScan and related security products and services, including the IntruShield, Entercept, and Foundstone brands. McAfee has released two new security packages, McAfee VirusScan Plus and McAfee Total Protection. McAfee Total Protection is the new security suite, containing all of the McAfee security tools, while McAfee VirusScan Plus contains the basic security needs which include anti virus, firewall, and anti spyware. Both these products are based on McAfee's new technology, codenamed Falcon which was released on August 1st 2006. They are meant to compete with Symantec's Norton 360 and Microsoft's Windows OneCare. They debuted alongside an updated Internet Security Suite.

The company was founded in 1987 as McAfee Associates, named for its founder John McAfee. Network Associates was formed in 1997 as a merger of McAfee Associates and Network General. In the year 2004, a major restructuring occurred. In the spring, the company sold the Magic Solutions business to Remedy, a subsidiary of BMC Software. In the summer of 2004,



the company sold the Sniffer Technologies business to Network General. Also, the company changed its name to McAfee to reflect its focus on security-related technologies.

Among other companies bought and sold by McAfee is Trusted Information Systems, which developed the Firewall Toolkit, which was the open source foundation for the commercial Gauntlet Firewall, which was later sold by McAfee to Secure Computing Corporation. Network Associates, as a result of brief ownership of TIS Labs/NAI Labs/Network Associates Laboratories/McAfee Research, was highly influential in the world of Open Source software, as that organization produced portions of the Linux, FreeBSD, and Darwin operating systems, developed portions of the BIND name server software, as well as SNMP version three. On April 5, 2006, McAfee bought out SiteAdvisor, a service that warns users if downloading software or filling out forms on a site may obtain malware or spam.


Here are some more computer virus protection articles...