HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE

Protection against malware, spyware and adware
If you work in an office, IT will likely manage your virus protection. This does not protect you well if you suddenly have to work from your personal computer. It's pretty bad to think that ransomware could encrypt your personal documents, but much worse if you can't access documents that last for months on a professional project. More than ever, you need antivirus protection for your own files and those of your company.

We call it antivirus software, but the truth is that it is unlikely to be affected by a real computer virus. Malware is all about making money these days, and there is no easy way to profit from the spread of a virus. Ransomware and Trojans that steal data are much more common, as are bots that the bot-herder can use to rent his computer for shameful purposes. Modern antivirus utilities deal with Trojans, rootkits, spyware, adware, ransomware, and more.

Some commercial non-standard antivirus utilities have proven effective enough to get an excellent four-star rating along with their more traditional counterparts. VoodooSoft VoodooShield bases its protection on removing all unknown programs when the computer is in a vulnerable state, for example. B. when you are connected to the Internet and detect known malware. The remedy restores the computer to a known security state every time it is restarted, eliminating malware. These are interesting approaches, but they are not directly comparable to conventional antivirus tools.

These commercial products offer protection beyond Windows 10's built-in antivirus. The best free antivirus utilities also offer more than Windows. However, the Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center seems to be improving lately, with very good results from independent testing labs. The combination of good laboratory results and an excellent result in our practical malware protection test was enough to earn 3.5 stars.

Test defense against malware, spyware and adware
We subject each product to its own practical malware protection test to get an idea of ​​how it works. Depending on how precisely the product prevents malware installation, you can earn up to 10 points for protection against malware.

Our malware protection test necessarily uses the same examples for months. To test how a product handles new malware, we test each product with 100 extremely new malware hosting URLs provided by MRG-Effitas and determine the percentage of them that have been blocked. Products receive the same credit for preventing access to the malicious URL and removing malware during download.

Some products receive excellent reviews from independent laboratories, but they don't perform as well in our practical tests. In such cases, we turn to laboratories as they provide considerably more resources for their testing.