Information about Antivirus protection
After installing an antivirus program, immediatly update and scan all your drives/files. Although antivirus programs will protect you from viruses, downloading and installing antivirus software will not protect you 100 percent for a few reasons:
- New viruses start spreading every day, it takes time to develop a new virus definition file
- If you're computer is allready infected with a virus before installing antivirus software chances are, the virus will keep being there
- Surfing safe will severely reduce the risk of infection, take a look at the articles listed under 'Surfing Safe'
- Update your antivirus software as often as possible, new viruses keep appearing
- A good firewall is essential, since hackers can take voer your computer and plant viruses or, even worse, send viruses using your system.This way you're going to be held responsible for spreading the virus
- Two or more scanners on your system will NOT increase your protection they will disable each other or make your system unstable and thus vulnerable
There's a big difference between the two Antivirus categories on the left. Antivirus protection programs have a realtime scanning engine. Every file being opened, modified, saved, downloaded etc. will be automatically scanned by the protection program. Antivirus scanners only scan your files and folders when told to, they don't provide realtime protection. When you get a virus after an on-demand scan the scanner will NOT warn you, since it offers no realtime protection. A big warning goes out to you, because there's a lot of rogue software on the web, you can find a list here.
The minimum requirements for a 'safe' Antivirus product:
- Realtime scanning engine
- Updates appear at least twice a week
- Email scanning, both incoming and outgoing email
- Heuristic scanning, this option can find unknown malware by analyzing the code of programs/files
Preferred/recommended features of a good scanner:
- Script/macro scanner/blocker
- Customizable auto-update
- P2P and IM scanner, though realtime protection will deal with this most of the time