1. A method comprising: maintaining, by a general purpose processor, a page directory and a page table within a system memory of the general purpose processor, the page directory and the page table containing therein information for translating virtual addresses to physical addresses within a physical address space of the system memory; offloading, by the general purpose processor, virus processing of a content object to a hardware accelerator coupled to the general purpose processor by storing virus scanning parameters, including the content object and information regarding a type of the content object, to the system memory using one or more virtual addresses and indicating to the hardware accelerator that the content object is available for virus processing; responsive to said indicating, the hardware accelerator: translating the one or more virtual addresses to one or more corresponding physical addresses based on the page directory and the page table; accessing the virus scanning parameters based on the one or more corresponding physical addresses; scanning the content object for viruses by applying a plurality of virus signatures against the content object based on the type of the content object; and returning a result of the scanning to the general purpose processor by writing the result to the system memory.