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What field of computer science deals with creating antivirus for computers?

I am a computer science major and want to go into the field where programmers great antivirus for computer, and I am not sure what classes to take. #computer #computer-science-phd

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Krishna’s Answer

To make antivirus you have to be seriously good at programming. To get job in a reputed company, you need to have a degree related to Computer science and programming which you already have. I can assure that just a degree will not help you become a programmer and I am sure that you know it. You need to put in a lot of extra effort and self studies and should become proficient in Cyber security and Cryptography. If you start researching on it you will find a lot of branches like mobile security, network security, cloud security and many more. You will need to have some amount of knowledge in all these fields. Above all you should be really good at programming and should be well versed in almost all the major programming languages. Work hard and you can get it. All the best.
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Larry’s Answer

Virus/Antivirus is about exploit/vulnerability and self-replication. It is generally associated with cyber security and cross so many disciplines — from hardware to operation system, to middleware, to application. There is not one course to teach you all that. But basic computer science course will lay a good foundation for you to advance in this direction.
The best way to learn Virus/Antivirus is get your hands on one. ClamAv (clamav.net) is a good open source one you can take a look. There are plenty of virus specimen on the web you can search, download and learn how they works. Basically take your time read the manual/read the code, experiment with it. Probably also join a chat group with similar interests, so you have a place to turn for help.

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Alexander’s Answer

The others' answers are great so I'm just going to expand on them. If you want to be good at creating security software, you need to be good at creating malware. If you don't know how the attackers operate, the tools they use, etc. then you'll never really understand how to counter them. I am NOT advising you do anything illegal. You can create and test malware in your own private lab environment (virtual machines), and you can reverse engineer malware from the wild. There are ethical hacker courses you can take in many large universities, and there are courses available online.
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