As technology advanced, and computers got empowered from just computing devices, the threat also increased for corruption or theft of data. Many fraudulent and treacherous people using the ability of programming languages, developed malicious code which could perform a task harming your computer in one way or the other. Also that code was capable of replicating itself. These snaps of code came to be known as Computer viruses. Initially they were just programming errors but later on seeing the potential of damage they can create, people started making them deliberately. Thus totally a new breed of applications was developed to provide security to computers called Antivirus software applications.
The inception of anti-virus software applications goes back to 1971, where Bob Thompson of BBN Technologies developed an experimental self-replicating program called Creeper. Now, Creeper affected a lot of computers there to the extent that it had to develop another program called Reaper to delete it. So you can say that, not technically, but yes Reaper was the first anti-virus. Slowly and steadily as programmers got powerful, more and more deadlier and damaging viruses came into the market and with the flourishing of internet the infection of viruses spread like a tsunami. But simultaneously even the anti-virus applications got powerful enough to curb them down and provide security to the host computers.
Several big names came up in the market with their products as antivirus software applications. But products like AVG, McAfree, Kaspersky, Avast, Notron, Avira, BitDefender, etc. gained a considerable appreciation and worked very nicely against viruses and other malicious content. Even the technology of scanners used in antivirus applications saw a great deal of development. Today we have Quarantine technology to keep viruses in a secured vault rather than deleting it completely because if the virus has bonded itself with some crucial system file then it will delete that too along with it causing the system unwanted damage. We also have Sandbox approach to run unknown code. There were also viruses and malicious programs which decorated themselves as antivirus programs like WinFixer, MS Antivirus etc and infiltrated the systems. But they couldn't last long as all good anti-virus programs have a regular update system where they constantly update their virus definition files providing maximum security against even the freshly detected viruses.
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