MSAV


Microsoft Anti-Virus was an antivirus program introduced by Microsoft for its MS-DOS operating system. The program first appeared in MS-DOS version 6.0
and last appeared in MS-DOS 6.22. The first version of the antivirus program was basic, had no inbuilt update facility and could scan for 1,234 different viruses. Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows, included as part of the package, was a front end that allowed MSAV to run properly on Windows 3.1x.

History

Microsoft Anti-Virus was supplied by Central Point Software Inc. and was a stripped down version of the Central Point Anti-Virus product which Central Point Software Inc., had licensed from Carmel Software Engineering in Haifa, Israel. Carmel Software sold the product as Turbo Anti-Virus both domestically and abroad.
Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows was also provided by Central Point Software.

Features

MSAV featured the "Detect and Clean" strategy and the detection of boot sector and Trojan horse-type viruses.
The program also had an anti-stealth and check sum feature that could be used to detect any changes in normal files. This technology was intended to make up for the unavailability of regular update packages. The final update of MSAV was released in June 1996 by Symantec. The update added the ability to detect polymorphic viruses and the virus definitions were updated to scan for a total of 2,371 viruses.

VSafe TSR

VSafe was a terminate and stay resident component of MSAV that provided real-time virus protection.
By default, VSafe does the following:
There are more features that can be enabled, VSafe can:
VSafe had a number of virus definitions embedded within its executable and was capable of loading additional signatures from an external definition file.