Let’s start this articles off with a question: When did you
do a full virus scan of your PC? For most users the answer would be, “I have an
anti-virus program installed and it did not detect anything or alerted me that
it caught the virus infection.” Unfortunately, anti-virus programs cannot catch
every single infected files that pass through your computer. Those files can
lay dormant in your drive waiting for you to set it lose with a double click
and depending how fast your anti-virus program can react or even still detect
the virus it can be over in a few seconds.
In the old days you had only one type of virus where it went
out of its way just to corrupt your data but today data theft is a major
business and virus have grown to reflect that. To quickly highlight, you have Trojan
Horses that make your computer available to the hacker for remote access
whether it is to see and record what you are doing or to utilise your computer
as zombie in a botnet attack on another computer system.
Then you have Ransomware or Crypto viruses which are viruses
that encrypt your documents, photos even music and video files then alerts you
with a message that to regain access to these files again you must paid a
certain sum to a certain account there then you are given a password or a key
file to decrypt your files. Like with most hostage situations it rarely turn
out well.
So what protection should you get? The general rule is: paid
is best but free is still good. Nearly all users except professional will end
using free AV programs even though they started with paid ones because mostly
because they do not want to be hassled by a yearly paid subscription. To cover
the wider audience we will focus on free AV programs.
When hunting for a good free AV program a user should
consider how good are its detection rates and how much system resources the
program uses. For determining how effective the detection rate of an AV program
you can check out http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php
for the latest scores.
System resources hogging is not really an issue anymore with
current computers being quad core systems with 4GB of RAM, for older systems
having your AV program lagging your productivity when it scans data from
websites and drives can be very annoying. Cloud Protection is something to look
into then when selecting an AV program. AV programs like Avira will send all
data to its server to scan for infections leaving practically no workload on
your computer. The only disadvantage is that if you lose your internet
connection you lose your protection. Another consideration is getting an AV
program with a minimal interface and avoid those with a lot of fancy animated
menus.
Other ways you can try to keep your computer up and running
clean is installing Malwarebytes as a secondary, manual AV scanner. Not only
does it detect viruses but Malwarebytes specialises in detecting naughty stuff
left over after visiting questionable websites.
Another safety precaution is to get a pop-up blocker
extension/plugin for your browser. Some questionable website will try to start a
virus infection going with pop-up window of an advert. Don’t forgot that you
should at least once a month run your AV programs’ Full Scan Mode for any
hidden infections, preferably once a week.
On my personal computer I have 360 Internet Security and
Malwarebytes which I set aside about one and half hours for the programs to
spend scanning (not at the same time) my drives for infections.
Finally, do not rely on Microsoft Defender and Security
Essentials as both programs are no longer really supported by Microsoft even
though there are updates for them.
Below is a personal detection test I ran of several popular
AV programs with the freshest viruses of the day (Feb 20 – Mar 3 2014) plucked
from Malware Tips’ Virus Exchange forum.
You can check out the AVs listed here in action on my YouTube channel ig33ku.
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