Testing anti-virus software is a tricky endeavour at the best of times, due to the inherent nasty nature of the test subject. For this anti-virus roundup, we asked independent anti-virus testing lab, AV-Test.org (www.av-test.org) to conduct the testing for us in their controlled environments. AV-Test.org has access to thousands of viruses, and is a respected anti-virus testing lab.

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Free commercial anti-virus client

Bigelows Virus Troubleshooting Pocket Reference provides a thorough review of malware (that is, malicious software).

Security companies have predicted that the Mydoom mass mailing virus would have as large an impact as last year’s Sobig worm.

Before widespread use of the Internet, computer viruses were not a common occurrence. Viruses could only be transferred via floppy disk, which meant that it was quite easy to guard against them

Windows, not chips, the target of Bounds virus.

Sophos Anti-Virus is clearly aimed at the enterprise market, with the minimum purchase being a 10-user licence, renewable annually. Unlike some of the other packages, Sophos is available for most operating systems including Unix, Open VMS, NetWare and Macintosh.

Microsoft bought anti-spyware technology last week to protect its Internet Explorer browser from surging rivals like Mozilla's Firefox, Gartner analysts in the US have said.

Norman Virus Control is a very unobtrusive anti-virus program that sits in your system tray and performs much like Norton AntiVirus from Symantec. It scans all incoming emails, new files, removable media and downloaded files from the internet as a matter of course without any user interaction.

Proof of concept code shows advanced attack vector.

Kapersky Antivirus has been around for some time and often pops up on home computers as the uneducated user’s anti-virus software of choice. Unfortunately, it really isn’t as user friendly a program as it should be for novice users.

Proof-of-concept virus largely harmless.