Antivirus and antimalware protection is becoming more and more essential as technology evolves.  It used to be that if your computer were to get infected, you would risk losing access to your hard work and contents of your hard drive, but infections today hold real world consequences to those affected.  You run the risk of not only losing access to your pictures, documents and music, you run the risk of losing your identity, your bank accounts, and credit card information.  The people who create these infectious programs are creative and cunning, your response needs to be too.

The first thing that you need to do to avoid infecting your valuable technology is to be skeptical, of everything.  If you get an email from, for example, Amazon asking you to review an order, then don’t click on any links in the email.  You should always go directly to the website/app and look things up there.  If it is truly a problem, then the problem will be posted there as well.  Some of the fraudulent emails that are sent out can be very convincing, but always look twice and then go to the source to verify.

The next thing that you need is good protection on your computer, and there are many great vendors out there to help you protect your information.  Here are some that I have had some experience with:

Norton Antivirus: 
Norton Antivirus, developed and distributed by Symantec in 1991 is a strong contender in the security suite game. The product has 25 years of evolution under its belt and it definitely packs-a-punch when it comes to design and usability! Symantec haven’t just concentrated on the private sector but have also generated a ‘small business’ solution which allows centralized management from the cloud. Being one of the most identifiable brands in the antivirus industry, (possibly due to it’s original colour scheme?) means that software issues in any of the versions released could mean huge amounts of stick from the media. However it’s not all bad news, Norton have more PC magazine editors’ choice awards than any other security company. PCMAG.com have awarded Norton their editors’ choice 37 times!  It is the gold standard when it comes to residential protection.

Vipre Antivirus:
Vipre Advanced Security offers most expected suite features at a lower price than many competitors, but our tests results show that its components don’t deliver consistently excellent protection.  Vipre has been around for over 20 years. Originally published by Sunbelt Software, its name stood for “Virus Intrusion Protection Remediation Engine.” Over the years, the product was first bought by GFI, and then spun off as a separate company called ThreatTrack. You can still see this history in some of the product’s web pages. We used this product when it was built in to the GFI suite and had it installed on many client PCs.  We were happy with the performance. It comes in at a good price point and has some incentive pricing to get you started.

ESET:
ESET has been around for a long time, 30 years!  Which is about 10 lifetimes in IT years.  That speaks volumes about the company and the product.  Their antivirus product is top notch and boasts a very small footprint that doesn’t slow down your computer and waste your time.  And in reality, that is exactly how it works… effortlessly behind the scenes.  This is a great antivirus product to help keep you safe.

Bitdefender:
I recently installed Bitdefender at a non-profit client who has an inner-city computer lab.  Their mission is to help underprivileged kids in their community by giving access to computers and technology.  It couldn’t have come at a better time, they opened their doors in the summer of 2020 and were there to help the kids of their neighborhood get set up for remote learning when school rolled around in the fall.  Having computers for kids to use presents a very real threat to the computers in the network, because kids, generally, aren’t as cautious when clicking on links and pop-ups.  It speaks volumes about the Bitdefender security product that we have not had a single infection on any of the computers this entire year.  I happily recommend this product.

There are many more products out there to help keep your computer and your data safe.  I’ll keep checking them out and letting you know so you can stay up to speed!