Antivirus gearslutz

Fortunately, Windows 8. If you're just aiming to keep your PC free from infection, Defender and its related Windows features might provide all the protection you need.

But it can't match the extra features that come with the best paid antivirus software and even some other free programs. If you've got kids at home, you can get a premium security suite that includes parental controls along with antivirus software. Many suites also include VPN service, password managers, backup software or even identity-theft protection — all bundled more cheaply than if you bought each feature on its own.

Each brand's antivirus programs share one Windows malware-detection "engine," but more features get added as subscription prices rise. Norton LifeLock has even more plans mixing in various levels of protection. The more expensive plans also bundle in antivirus software for Macs and Android devices and offer limited security programs for iOS devices as well.

There are no true antivirus apps for iPhones and iPads. Here's our list of the best paid antivirus programs. Don't forget to check out our list of the best free antivirus software halfway down this page. Kaspersky provides the best antivirus protection overall Kaspersky Total Security combines one of the world's top-rated malware-detection engines with a ton of useful features. It's the best antivirus software you can buy today.

Click here if you're in the U. Bitdefender offers the best value in antivirus software Bitdefender Antivirus Plus combines great malware protection with an assortment of useful features and an easy-to-use interface, all at a very affordable price.

Norton packs in everything but the kitchen sink Norton's antivirus products offer a password manager, unlimited VPN data, identity theft protection, parental controls and even online storage. If you're willing to pay full freight, you'll get almost every kind of digital security you could ever need. Kaspersky Total Security 2. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 3. Norton Deluxe 4. McAfee Internet Security 5. Trend Micro Maximum Security 6. Sophos Home Premium. Our top choice is Kaspersky Total Security, which delivers excellent malware protection, a full complement of extra features and an easy-to-use interface.

Right behind that are the entry-level Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, the best bargain in antivirus software, and Norton Deluxe, which offers a ton of extra features, including unlimited VPN service and LifeLock identity protection. Any of these three would serve you well, but the ideal choice depends on your circumstances. See our section on how to choose the best antivirus software below, or our stand-alone antivirus buying guide.

Both offered excellent protection without system slowdowns, but Kaspersky's free program lets you schedule scans, adds a ton of useful extras and had the smallest system impact we've ever seen. Kaspersky's Windows products have excellent malware-detection scores and a light-to-moderate system-performance impact, the two most important criteria in our rankings.

But it's beaten by Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, which has even more features. It has a secure browser, anti-theft protection for laptops, webcam protection and a limited-use VPN client that kicks in when you connect to an open Wi-Fi network. We think it's the best antivirus software you can buy today. Read our full Kaspersky Total Security review. The best antivirus software you can buy Kaspersky offers excellent malware protection, lots of useful extra features and a light system impact with an easy-to-use interface.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is our top choice among entry-level antivirus products. It has very good, if not perfect, malware-detection scores. Its active scans don't add much to the background system impact, but that background load is a bit heavy. It also offers the most value, with an unlimited password manager, a secure browser with a virtual keyboard, a Wi-Fi network scanner, a file shredder, protection against encrypting ransomware and Bitdefender's new web-privacy software -- features often found only with pricier antivirus packages.

The midrange Bitdefender Internet Security adds parental controls, webcam protection and a two-way firewall, while Bitdefender Total Security tops off the lineup with an anti-theft feature for laptops, a system optimizer and licenses for Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android. Read our full Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review. All of Norton's antivirus products offer excellent malware protection, and the once-heavy system-performance load is much lighter.

The number of extra features each program has varies, but the sweet spot in the lineup is Norton Deluxe. It includes a password manager that works on all major platforms, unlimited VPN service, dark-web personal-data monitoring, parental controls and up to 50GB of online storage space.

Two other offerings, Norton Premium and Norton Platinum, give you more online storage and expand the antivirus and VPN coverage to 10 and 20 devices, respectively. If you want full-on identity protection, Norton offers three bundles with varying degrees of LifeLock service and even more online storage. Their subscription prices run well into the triple digits, but still cost less than if you were to buy the identity protection, password manager, cloud-backup storage and antivirus software separately.

Unlike some of the other best antivirus software makers, Norton doesn't offer a file shredder, file encryption or secure web browser with any of its products. Yet every other digital-protection service you could possibly ask for is included with at least some of its bundles. Read our full Norton Deluxe review. McAfee's malware detection has improved greatly in the past couple of years, but it's still not quite top-of-the-line.

To get parental controls or one of the best password managers in the business, you'll have to spring for McAfee Total Protection or its sibling McAfee LiveSafe, which comes pre-installed on many new PCs. The multi-device licenses of those two security suites also come with an identity-protection service.

But none of the McAfee products have a secure browser or webcam protection, which you often get with other premium antivirus programs. Read our full McAfee Internet Security review. Trend Micro offers very good protection, but its malware-detection engine creates a heavy system load during scans and returns a fair number of false-positive results. Parental controls, a system optimizer and a file shredder are bundled into the mid-range Trend Micro Internet Security.

Trend Micro Maximum Security adds a password manager, a secure browser and file encryption, while the new Trend Micro Premium Security adds a VPN and dark-web monitoring of personal data. However, none of Trend Micro's programs include a two-way firewall or webcam protection, standard with other brands' midrange offerings.

Nor does the premium product have the cloud storage or backup software that some of the best antivirus brands add as enticements to their flagship packages. Read our full Trend Micro Maximum Security review. ESET is one of the biggest antivirus names in Europe, with a very small system-performance load and fast scans.

Its malware-detection rate used to be kind of meh, but has improved markedly in recent lab tests. However, there's no VPN client, backup software or file shredder. ESET's pricing is per device, which is optimal for users who might have more than a few devices to protect. But if your device count gets into double digits, ESET's costs can add up. Sophos Home Premium does its job economically, offering reasonable protection from malware at an affordable price.

Because it's spun off from Sophos' enterprise software for business clients, Sophos Home Premium lacks many of the bells and whistles other security suites offer, such as a password manager, identity theft protection service or VPN service. Should they continue to market their products as antivirus software at the risk of sounding reductive?

Should they use another "anti-threat" term for marketing themselves like "anti-spyware," for example? Or was it better to take an all-inclusive approach and combine everything in a single product line that addressed all threats? The answers to these questions depend on the company. At Malwarebytes, cybersecurity is our highest-level catchall category. It makes sense to combine our anti-threat effort into a single term that covers more than just viruses.

Viruses are just one kind of malware. There are other forms of malware that are more common these days. Here are just a few:. Adware is unwanted software designed to throw advertisements up on your screen, often within a web browser, but sometimes within mobile apps as well.

Typically, adware disguises itself as legitimate or piggybacks on another program to trick you into installing it on your PC, tablet, or mobile device.

Spyware is malware that secretly observes the computer user's activities, including browsing activity, downloads, payment information, and login credentials, and then reports this information to the software's author. Spyware isn't just for cybercriminals. Legitimate companies sometimes use spyware to track employees. A keylogger , spyware's less sophisticated cousin, is malware that records all the user's keystrokes on the keyboard.

This malware typically stores the gathered information and sends it to the attacker seeking sensitive information like usernames, passwords, or credit card details.

A computer virus is malware that attaches to another program and, when triggered, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and infecting them with its own bits of code. Worms are a type of malware similar to viruses in that they spread, but they don't require user interaction to be triggered.

A Trojan , or Trojan Horse, is more of a delivery method for infections than an infection. The Trojan presents itself as something useful to trick users into opening it.

Trojan attacks can carry just about any form of malware, including viruses, spyware, and ransomware. Famously, the Emotet banking Trojan started as an information stealer, targeting banks and large corporations. Later, Emotet operated purely as an infection vector for other forms of malware, usually ransomware.

Ransomware has been called the cybercriminal's weapon of choice, because it demands a profitable quick payment in hard-to-trace cryptocurrency. A rootkit is malware that provides the attacker with administrator privileges on the infected system and actively hides from the normal computer user. Rootkits also hide from other software on the system—even from the operating system itself. Malicious cryptomining , also sometimes called drive-by mining or cryptojacking , is an increasingly prevalent form of malware or browser-based attack that is delivered through multiple attack methods, including malspam, drive-by downloads, and rogue apps and extensions.

So instead of letting you cash in on your computer's horsepower, the cryptominers send the collected coins into their own account—not yours. So, essentially, a malicious cryptominer is stealing your device's resources to make money. Exploits are a type of threat that takes advantage of bugs and vulnerabilities in a system in order to allow the exploit's creator to deliver malware.

One of the most common exploits is the SQL injection. Malvertising is an attack that uses malicious ads on mostly legitimate websites to deliver malware. You needn't even click on the ad to be affected—the accompanying malware can install itself simply by loading and viewing the page in your browser.

All you have to do is visit a good site on the wrong day. Spoofing occurs when a threat pretends to be something it's not in order to deceive victims to take some sort of action like opening an infected email attachment or entering their username and password on a malicious site spoofed or faked to look like a legitimate site.

Phishing is a type of attack aimed at getting your login credentials, credit card numbers, and any other information the attackers find valuable. Phishing attacks often involve some form of spoofing, usually an email designed to look like it's coming from an individual or organization you trust. Many data breaches start with a phishing attack.

The old school method of signature-based threat detection is effective to a degree, but modern anti-malware also detects threats using newer methods that look for malicious behavior. To put it another way, signature-based detection is a bit like looking for a criminal's fingerprints. It's a great way to identify a threat, but only if you know what their fingerprints look like. Modern anti-malware takes detection a step further so it can identify threats it has never seen before.

By analyzing a program's structure and behavior, it can detect suspicious activity. Keeping with the analogy, it's a bit like noticing that one person always hangs out in the same places as known criminals and has a lock pick in his pocket.

This newer, more effective cybersecurity technology is called heuristic analysis. Each time a heuristic anti-malware program scans an executable file , it scrutinizes the program's overall structure, programming logic, and data. All the while, it looks for things like unusual instructions or junk code.

In this way, it assesses the likelihood that the program contains malware. What's more, a big plus for heuristics is its ability to detect malware in files and boot records before the malware has a chance to run and infect your computer.

You can certainly get spyware by surfing as a limited user. All you gotta do is go to porn sites, or sites that deal with wallpaper or cheat codes for video games. Instant spyware. I used NOD32 for awhile. Loads fast, not intrusive at all. But it failed to detect a bad spyware infestation. So I dumped it as well.

I no longer use any of that anti-stuff. It doesn't work. Plus you are constantly downloading updates and paying the company money to renew. It's far better to stay clean to start with. Prevention is the best medicine, rather than using a useless tool in an effort to try to remove something nasty on your system. The next time you reformat and reinstall the OS, make a snapshot of your entire computer and store it on a separate drive.

When your system gets hosed, simply hit the Recover button. Instant health. That and stay away from known malware sites. These two approaches alone will give you far better results than using anti-spyware and anti-virus software. You should check out the Firefox extension: No Script. While I personally think the whole "keep your windows DAW off the internets" is blown way out of proportion, OP is handling files from unknown sources.

I'd get another computer and access it via VNC or similar. When comfortable with the file, transfer via a network share. I currently use a VM on my laptop for similar purposes well You say you have AVG. I'm not sure about the free version, but the Pro version allows you to configure when it pops up and asks you to update and when to test.

I've always found it non-invasive and minimal resource-wise compared to satanic software like Norton and McAfee. Check out the preferences - you may already have what you need. The OP posted this in March and hasn't been back since to make another post. The best response was the first one stating to use clamwin on a pen drive Best practice is of course for the OP to scan everything coming in.

I don't mean to be an asshole but why bring this back to life? Yeah, a bit old topic. Avira Antivir. Or use a dual boot system with swappable system drives. Top Mentioned Manufacturers. A fantastic price, for a fully-featured antivirus. The main attraction here is the absolute stack of features you get - even with the entry-level Antivirus Plus product — not to mention the quality of those features. They include a really useful intelligent firewall, which is a genuinely big help in terms of policing your system, along with some very thorough browser protection measures to keep you safe on the web.

And in our very own ransomware testing, we Norton came up a little bit short compared to the more effective protection offered by Bitdefender. If you want more then NortonLifeLock offers a range of higher-level suites. Norton Standard adds some nifty extra bits of functionality, including an integrated full VPN service, more backup storage 10GB and dark web monitoring for some countries, including the US and UK.

There are also strong mobile apps for Android and iOS. While Premium ramps that up again to 75GB backup and 10 devices. Editor's note: Unlike the other providers in this list, Kaspersky is yet to release the version of its antivirus.

What follows is the description of its plan, and will be updated once we have tested the updates. Its core antivirus capabilities are very strong, with Kaspersky ranking at or near the top in all the most recent reports from the big independent test labs.

Kaspersky also benefits from some nifty self-protection routines. The good news is that when it comes to extras, the bigger suites bundle more interesting functionality. Kaspersky Internet Security introduces an intelligent firewall which hardly ever bothers you with any queries , plus a secure browser, and it offers coverage for Macs, along with Android and iOS mobile devices.

Kaspersky Total Security brings in more on top of all that, including smart parental controls, a fully-fledged password manager, and automated local or Dropbox backups.

Another strong suit is the fact that this antivirus is currently top dog when it comes to blocking phishing sites according to AV-Comparatives , and it provides great web browsing protection including Pay Guard as a secure environment for the likes of online banking. Weak points? However, you do of course get more functionality with the higher-level security suites from Trend Micro.

The next tier product, Trend Micro Internet Security, throws in some interesting extras including parental controls and social media protection tools. Whereas most updates on this list are fairly superficial, Avast ripped everything up and started again for its latest release - introducing Avast One. Avast One takes the firm's trusted free antivirus now known as Avast One Essential and builds on it with extra features.

Whether you choose to go free or upgrade, the software is really in favor with the independent testing labs at the moment, ranking towards the top of the pile in real-world malware tests and anti-phishing tasks. You also benefit from a simple firewall, data breach scanning to warn you if your online accounts are breached, and apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.

So why bother paying for Avast One? You'd have to really want one of those specific add-ons to want to part with your cash, otherwise we'd suggest going for a more fully featured internet security suite or just sticking with the free Essential download.

We saw a lot more thought pieces coming out in suggesting that the time was at an end to pay for your antivirus software. And while we generally disagree with that notion, Microsoft Defender is probably the best argument in its favor. That's because if you're a Windows user, there's a perfectly capable virus protection already sitting within your operating system.

Microsoft Defender is a solid product that gives capable mid-range protection - mostly without users ever even knowing it's there. Defender has a dashboard, its own scan options and so on, but you'll never even see them unless you go looking. In the testing from independent lab AV-Comparatives, Defender ranked pretty much slap bang in the middle of the 17 tested providers. That means it's better at protecting your PC than even some of paid-for software out there.

Outside of pure virus protection, it features lots of bonus features such as multi-layered anti-ransomware, firewall, webcam and privacy protection, web filtering, parental controls and backup. So what's stopping you from forgetting the rest and simply getting Defender up and running? Well, those features mentioned above are all pretty basic and aren't up the standard of those offered by most of the security suites above.

And it probably goes without saying that Defender is only available on Windows PCs - forget protecting your Mac or smartphone - and some features only play nice if you use Edge as your browser. In truth, Avira is probably best known for its Avira Free antivirus option which is among the best out there - see further down this page , but its premium packages should not be sniffed at — especially when you consider the incredible price you can now pay for its Antivirus Pro package.

The interface is smart and the various features — including the free but limited to 1GB monthly VPN — are now better integrated within the UI overall. The caveat here is that the ratings of the antivirus engine from independent test labs are only middling at best — but the app does provide a decent enough level of protection. Upgrading to the Internet Security or Prime plan adds further features like a full password manager, and the Pro version of Software Updater which provides automatic updates for your apps , plus Prime gives you the unlimited usage version of the VPN and mobile app support.

A real bargain. McAfee takes an interesting approach with its security range, as all the offerings are variants of its core Total Protection product, with the main difference being more devices are supported at higher tiers. McAfee Total Protection Single Device is the entry-level antivirus product, and as the name suggests, it covers one device. There are also a ton of features on offer, particularly for a baseline product, and even if not all of them are of the highest quality, you get a lot for your money.

That includes an intelligent firewall, an integrated TunnelBear -powered VPN with unlimited data, a quality spam filter, secure file vault, and some PC speed-up options. The main stumbling block here is that the antivirus engine itself is not the best out there — although some results from independent test labs come out better than others — but this has to be something of a concern. Further up the Webroot range, SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus expands coverage from Windows and Mac PCs to mobile devices, also providing a password manager courtesy of LastPass and covering up to five devices rather than three.

And at the top of the tree is Internet Security Complete which introduces an automatic backup tool with 25GB of secure cloud storage and additional online privacy features. SecureAnywhere AntiVirus gives you everything you need, really, although Internet Security Plus is our top pick for the most rounded package. Sophos Home Premium covers up to an impressive 10 devices Windows and Mac computers.

Sophos provides capable virus protection, and worked well in passing our own anti-ransomware tests.