F-Secure Virus Definitions

With threats that increase in both number and diversity, it's necessary to make sure your computer and the data stored on it are secure. To this extent, not only that you must keep an antivirus with real-time protection capabilities running on the PC, but also make sure its virus definitions are up-to-date.

Like many of its competitors, F-Secure released a manual updater for the virus signatures, offering a solution to updating definitions when the Internet connection is down. The updater contains the latest definition files for various F-Secure products, including F-Secure Antivirus (for Workstation / Client security),  F-Secure Internet Security and some of the business editions.

The offline definitions can be used in situations when the Internet connection is down. In this case, the automatic definition updater in each F-Secure product will not work, since it cannot download the signature files from the F-Secure servers.

The FSUpdate utility must be downloaded periodically, transferred to the offline computer and launched with administrative privileges. The updater reveals a command line window that deploys the latest definitions. Please note that the virus definitions do not update themselves. In other words, to update again, you must download and run the utility once again.

Manually updating the F-Secure products requires nothing more than the offline updater and a little bit of patience. Still, on a computer connected to the Internet, the most convenient way to have the virus definitions updated is to allow the F-Secure product to phone back home and grab the files from over there. But no matter where you decide to get it, you should know that the FSUpdate tool includes all the virus databases, not just the virus one (spyware and spam, parental, and so on).