Computers have revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives for good, from helping students study while in hospitals, to monitoring patients and controlling crucial manufacturing processes. This increased reliance on computer gadgets has also brought a rise in cyberthreats, such as viruses, malware and ransomware. Antivirus software detects these threats to stop them from causing harm to your computer or stealing your personal information.
When selecting an antivirus software it is important to look at its virus scanning capabilities and whether it is equipped with a firewall, and how it performs in independent lab tests. You may also want to look at its customer support, how often it updates and the number of devices it is able to protect. Some programs, like Norton include additional features that secure your online privacy and prevent identity theft.
Top programs provide multiple security options. They offer heuristic detection which searches for behaviors that are typical of malware or viruses and signature matching that matches files against a database of known malicious codes. Some programs also use sandboxing, which isolates the suspicious files and puts them in a secure virtual environment where they can’t do any harm.
Many of the best antivirus programs are free, though they may not offer as many additional features as paid-for alternatives. For instance, Bitdefender’s free edition scored excellently in our tests and comes with a firewall, and its premium version comes with parental controls along with a file shredder as well as a password manager. In the same way, Malwarebytes’ free version scored top marks in AV-Test for 2023 but fell short in our test of usability. Intego Mac Internet Security X9 provides a robust combination of tools (VirusBarrier and NetBarrier) which snuffed out the majority of malware threats during our test.
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