Major Antivirus Software Companies - Tips To Select The Best One

What are some of the leading companies in the antivirus software market in the United States? Believe it or not, there are four of them. They are: Symantec which creates Norton Antivirus, Computer Associates or CA dealing in E-trust, McAfee and Trend Micro which manufacturers are PC-cillin. These companies have a huge share in the market.

Big software producer Microsoft is also planning to break into the market. In 2003, Microsoft obtained the rights to GeCad software, a Romanian company based in Bucharest. Microsoft also obtained two more companies: Giant Company Software, which developed behavior based computer security. They designed and came up with solutions for spyware. Sybari Software was also bought out. They were dealing with the ways of antivirus, and the filtering of spam and phishing.

Many industry watchers are waiting to see how Microsoft and Bill Gates will compete. They suspect that the giant software company when take a huge control in the antivirus market by bundling the software to its operating system... free of charge. Gates already has a huge lead when it comes to the word processing systems and the Internet web browsers.

There are many antivirus software vendors worldwide. They have some regional domination and are slowly showing their colors to others. Some of these antivirus companies are: Avira of Germany, Sophos of UK, AhnLab of South Korea and SoftWin in Romania.

These companies have independent testers like Virus Bulletin, West Coast Labs Checkmark Services and ICSA Labs. Some of the vendors will offer their software as freeware; others will be marked as shareware...meaning it must be bought.

Despite the overwhelming antivirus software, the market is not at all clear and the world is changing fast. It will be with great effort to meet head on with the viruses that seem to be appearing in greater numbers each day. They not only seem to increase but are becoming more complex each one is being released.

Even with this knowledge, not all companies will have the necessary resources that is required to steer forward with the challenges that will lie ahead.

There are hundreds of sample viruses that arrive to these companies. It seems that there is an 11% increase each year with the number of viruses that pop up. Their creators have made them even smarter than previous ones plus the viruses tend to move through computers even more quicker. They will hide by renaming themselves to avoid detection.

Remember no antivirus software can protect your computer 100 percent of the time since there are new viruses occuring every day. Steps should still be taken to protect your files from any type of invasion. Antivirus software are effective for viruses that are known and may save you tons of money in the long run.