Didn't mean to upset you, but here we do have respect, believe it or not. Just because somebody doesn't know your face doesn't mean they know you as a person. Take for example one of our members Uriah. He signed on about the same time I did, we hit it off relatively well, and through his recent extremely logical and well thought out argument about Anon, Anarchy, and government, he shows himself to be a very knowledgeable person and clearly is able to think things out. The end result being, I have a respect for him, having never met him in my life.
http://evilzone.org/general-galactica/anon-anarchy-and-current-governmentNow for the antivirus. I am no expert on the subject, but what an antivirus does is scans a programs code, the actual binary I believe (not sure on that one) and looks for certain patterns that a virus would have, like telling the machine to reconnect to a certain IP, etc. The thing is, these are patterns, and sometimes the AV can be overzealous and if it sees something that just might in any way possible at all pose even a very small threat of danger, it counts it as a virus and jails it. You can usually tell about the reputation of a program by looking at its download page. If its off a random torrent, then you most likely have a virus, if its off a source forge page with lots of support and changelogs and docs with ways to contact the writer, basically very professional looking, then its probably not a virus. You can also monitor what it is trying to do by running it in a sandbox and viewing its attempted connections or file access. As for the finding a virus with an AV, I'm not sure of any set way to just examine a file without an extra tools and coming to the conclusions of a virus or not, but the best thing you can do is set up your security. I have an antivirus and a 3rd party firewall that monitors everything, and most importantly, I watch what I download. Same thing as before, downloading from a shady site without much docs is usually a bad idea. Once again, I am merely in the same boat as you, a beginner, I've just been rowing a bit longer. Perhaps these threads will help:
http://evilzone.org/tutorials/become-an-antivirushttp://evilzone.org/ebooks/the-art-of-computer-virus-research-and-defense
