Regardless of the operating system you use, you are equally at risk of being attacked by cybercriminals and various viruses, so choosing antivirus software that will protect you is a critical decision. There are a huge number of offers on the market today from antivirus developers, but not all of them are of high quality or profitable. That is why you need to know clearly what characteristics good antivirus software should have, and in this article, we will talk about them in more detail.
Protection against serious threats
The most important thing when choosing an antivirus is the methods of its protection. In addition to protecting against viruses, today’s vendors also take care to protect against other more serious problems. An antivirus should protect you from:
- Malware -these are malicious programs that infect your system and keep it from working. Viruses, Trojans, spyware, adware, and ransomware
- Fraud -the various ways cybercriminals use to steal your personal data, after which there can be various negative consequences. Usually, hackers do this through emails, websites, public wi-fi, etc.
Sometimes these two types of threats intertwine with each other so it is important to have a flexible and unique antivirus that can counter them.
Real-time prevention and quick infection removal
Antivirus should always be on the alert and react quickly when a threat occurs. The best antiviruses try to eliminate malware before it even gets into the system.
To do this, they use the following features:
- Reactive file scanning – always checks new files for a threat before you open them
- Complete system scan – a regular practice that analyzes your entire device for suspicious activity
- Web Browsing Protection – blocks suspicious websites from allowing you to visit them, preventing you from falling into phishing traps
Accuracy and efficiency
It is very important that your antivirus can accurately identify threats and deal with them effectively. Make sure your vendor guarantees you a reliable detection rate and a database of known threats. Thus, after scanning, the antivirus must clearly provide which files are malicious and which are not.
There should be no room for such cases in your choices:
- False positives-when the program confuses a clean file with a threat and immediately deletes it
- False negatives – the program sees the virus files as safe and determines that they can be opened.
In order to find out if an antivirus is capable of such mistakes, we advise you to check the results of antivirus testing by organizations such as AV-Comparatives. They conduct rigorous tests and assess the antivirus’s ability to cope. At this point you should think about Bitdefender, AVG, Avast, or Malwarebytes download, these antiviruses have shown themselves to be worthy.
Ease of use
This too is a key point that will make it easy to adapt and get started. You should not choose a program with an uncomfortable interface and incomprehensible settings, because this way you risk becoming vulnerable to external attacks since you won’t be able to keep the program active.
Most users do not know how to operate such programs professionally, so it would be great if some of the anti-virus functions were automatized.
This includes automatic updates and scans so that the system remains in working order and does not open to threats, as well as a simple user interface so that immediately after installation you can begin to navigate in space and understand where to click and what to do.