However, due to a coding error it crashed thousands of servers and earned its creator a felony conviction. Modern malware coders are way beyond the "look at me! They're in it for the money—period—and there's not a lot of money in viruses and worms. Trojan horse programs can be more lucrative. This sort of malware appears as, and may even be, a useful program of some kind, but once you let it inside the walls of your computer, it turns loose a crew of nasties.
They may send your personal and financial data to malware HQ, install additional programs to earn per-installation cash, or anything the coders can think of to monetize their control of your computer. Trojans that transmit your private information are one kind of spyware.
Other types of spyware focus on tracking your web-browsing habits, or the way you use your computer. Keylogger spyware tools record the keystrokes you type, hoping to hit pay dirt by capturing your passwords. Some anti-malware tools include components specifically devoted to spyware protection. Another common threat is what's called a bot. Typically, the bot owner uses spam or drive-by downloads to infect many computers, and then sells the services of this herd of bots.
Customers can contract with the bot-herder for tasks including bitcoin mining , distributing spam, or participating in a distributed denial of service attack. The current alpha predator of money-making malware, though, is ransomware—specifically, encrypting ransomware. If this kind of attack hits your computer, you'll find that all your essential files have been encrypted.
The perpetrator of the attack will gladly decrypt them for you—if you pay the ransom. Worst of all, even if you manage to remove the ransomware itself, your files remain encrypted. It's a nightmare! Most malware-fighting tools also handle removal of potentially unwanted applications—PUAs for short. In many cases, you must choose whether or not to remove these. They're not specifically malicious, but they may well be unwanted. For example, you may have installed an ad-supported free utility without realizing just how invasive its advertisements would be.
Or you may have clicked through screen after screen during one program's installation, without realizing that by doing so you agreed to install a boatload of other programs. And it's not uncommon for these programs to resist uninstallation. Companies like AppEsteem aim to eliminate these deceptive bundling practices, but if you've already been hit, you need some help to clean up the mess. You absolutely need at least a basic level of protection for all of your devices, and that means an antivirus utility.
As noted, despite the name these products do a lot more than fight viruses. They take aim at every kind of malware, and some of them do a great job. But, you may ask, doesn't Windows 10 have antivirus built right in?
It's true that Microsoft Defender is built into Windows 10, and it gained more responsibilities with updates in the last few years. If you have no other antivirus, Microsoft Defender turns on automatically. If you install a third-party antivirus, it goes dormant. Microsoft Defender has been getting better scores from the independent labs, and in our own tests, but the best third-party antivirus products, both free and premium, score way higher.
Even though Microsoft Defender isn't the best, you may be reluctant to pay for antivirus protection, given that you can get it for free.
As it turns out, quite a few companies offer free antivirus solutions, and some of them are quite good. Most purveyors of free antivirus protection also offer a premium, paid edition. In some cases, the premium edition includes features not available for free, or offers VIP tech support. Others make the full range of features free for consumers, but require payment for business-related use.
The best of these free antivirus utilities outperform all but the top for-pay competitors. You can launch a full antivirus scan of your computer at will, to root out any preexisting malware problems.
Most also let you schedule a regular scan. But the first line of defense is on-access scanning. For some antivirus utilities, the minuscule access that occurs when Windows Explorer displays a file's details is sufficient to trigger a scan. Others wait until the file gets copied to disk, or until just before it executes. The main point is, your antivirus makes sure that no new malware can infest the computer.
Windows Security. Trend Micro Maximum Security. Avast One. Avira Prime. Total Security. Kaspersky Security Cloud Bitdefender Total Security. Panda Dome Premium. Sophos Home Premium. McAfee Total Protection. Behavioral detection successfully blocked ransomware. Cloud Console allows full remote management.
Surfing protection is browser independent. New browser extension detects phishing. CONS Almost no scores from independent labs. Phishing protection not for all browsers. Cloud Console may be too complicated for some. Are you hoping the holidays will bring you a sparkly brand-new computer? But the built-in protection typically expires in around three months, forcing you to pay for continued protection or select a different, better antivirus.
There are plenty of choices, so many that you may have trouble deciding. We call it antivirus, but in truth it's unlikely you'll get hit with an actual computer virus. Malware these days is about making money, and there's no easy way to cash in on spreading a virus.
Ransomware and data-stealing Trojans are much more common, as are bots that let the bot-herder rent out your computer for nefarious purposes. Modern antivirus utilities handle Trojans, rootkits, spyware, adware, ransomware, and more. As noted, PCMag has reviewed more than 40 different commercial antivirus utilities, and that's not even counting the many free antivirus tools. Out of that extensive field we've named four Editors' Choice products, honored others with a four-star rating, and bestowed 3.
If you have malware , one of the products listed in this article should take care of the problem. These commercial products offer protection beyond the antivirus built into Windows 10; the best free antivirus utilities also offer more than Windows does.
However, Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center is looking better and better lately, with some very good scores from independent testing labs. The combination of good lab scores and a great score in our hands-on malware protection test was enough to bring it up to 3. It doesn't appear in this roundup of commercial antivirus products, naturally.
We take the results reported by independent antivirus testing labs very seriously. The simple fact that a company's product shows up in the results is a vote of confidence, of sorts. It means the lab considered the product significant, and the company felt the cost of testing was worthwhile.
Of course, high scores in the tests are also important. We've devised a system for aggregating their results to yield a rating from 0 to We also subject every product to our own hands-on test of malware protection, in part to get a feeling for how the product works. Depending on how thoroughly the product prevents malware installation, it can earn up to 10 points for malware protection.
Our malware protection test necessarily uses the same set of samples for months. To check a product's handling of brand-new malware, we test each product using a large collection of extremely new malware-hosting URLs supplied by MRG-Effitas , noting what percentage of them it blocked. Products get equal credit for preventing all access to the malicious URL and for wiping out the malware during download.
Some products earn stellar ratings from the independent labs, yet don't fare as well in our hands-on tests. In such cases, we defer to the labs, as they bring significantly greater resources to their testing. Want to know more? Personal data protection fails in testing.
You can bundle up your computers in the warm, fuzzy protection of an effective antivirus without dipping into your funds. The best free third-party antivirus programs handily outperform Microsoft Defender, the antivirus built into Windows. In fact, they rate better than many commercial programs.
With free antivirus tools you get the added benefit of taking several out for a spin before making the final choice. Your antivirus should definitely have the ability to root out existing malware, but its ongoing task is to prevent ransomware, botnets, Trojans, and other types of nasty programs from getting a foothold.
All the antivirus programs in this collection offer real-time malware protection. Some take the fight to the browser, working hard to ensure you never even browse to a malware-hosting site, or get fooled into turning over your credentials to a phishing site.
If free antivirus tools are so great, why should anybody pay? For one thing, quite a few of these products are free only for noncommercial use; if you want to protect your business, you must pony up for the paid edition.
At that point, you should probably consider upgrading to a full security suite. After all, it's your business's security on the line. Even for personal use, most for-pay antivirus tools offer more than their free counterparts—sometimes a lot more. For example, the paid editions of Adaware and ZoneAlarm add protection against malicious and fraudulent websites the free versions lack.
And Panda reserves quite a few features for paying customers, among them firewall protection, application control, cross-platform support, and detection of insecure Wi-Fi connections. In addition, many companies don't offer full-scale tech support for users of the free edition. The first time you need extra help digging a particularly stubborn piece of malware out of your system, you might regret the lack of support. Around the world, researchers at independent antivirus testing labs spend their days putting antivirus tools to the test.
Some of these labs regularly release public reports on their findings. Security companies typically pay for the privilege of being included in testing.
In return, the labs supply them with detailed reports that can help improve their products. The number of labs that include a particular vendor serves as a measure of significance. In each case, the lab considered the product important enough to test, and the vendor felt the price was worthwhile. The labs don't necessarily test a vendor's free product, but most vendors pack full protection into the free product, enhancing premium versions with additional features.
In addition to carefully perusing results from the independent labs, we also run our own hands-on malware protection test. We expose each antivirus to a collection of malware samples, including a variety of different malware types, and note its reaction.
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