what is the difference between firewall and antivirus?

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what is the difference between firewall and antivirus?..

Answer / vikram

A firewall is a program that sits in between you and the
internet, it analyses incoming and outgoing traffic to try
to intercept threats to your security. It's mainly looking
for hacking attempts. As long as your internet connection is
open its like an open door to hackers. A good firewall will
make your pc invisible to most hackers. If they can't see
you they can't break in.
Its not foolproof, so an anti virus, an anti trojan, an anti
adware and an anti spyware are your next line of defence.
They scan everything on your system looking for malware (
malicious software) that is installed or running.
Some security programs have 'real time' scanning so also
watch for changes as they happen, like a firewall does.

You need a number of different security programs to deal
woth different problems. Here are some good freeware ones.

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what is the difference between firewall and antivirus?..

Answer / aarti soni

Firewall and antivirus software are two fundamentally different and complementary kinds of security applications.

Firewall :

Also known as a 'packet filter'. Basically, software which monitors network traffic and connection attempts into and out of a network or computer and determines whether or not to allow it to pass. Depending on the sophistication, this can be limited to simple IP/port combinations or do full content-aware scans.

A firewall can be thought of as a screen or sieve that categorically strains out potentially harmful data.

Antivirus:

A software which will find programs/files/software/etc that might compromise your computer, either by being executable or by exploiting a vulnerability in the program normally supposed to process them -- Rootkits, trojans, or other types of malware.

It detects these kinds of harmful programs that are already installed on your computer or about to be installed.

It can perform various protective measures (based on the security settings in the Anti-virus software) such as quarantine, permanent removal, fix, etc.,

It will also look for potentially harmful files that are downloaded from the internet or attached to an email and notifies/removes it to protect your computer.