Antivirus Against the Malicious Damage

Viruses are computer programs which may cause malicious damage, malicious damage created to computers in many ways: from simple discomfort to complete loss of documents (text, music, movies ...) and even the theft of sensitive information such as banking passwords. As anyone installs one of these harmful applications consciously, viruses are designed to 'sneak' without the user's knowledge. Antivirus programs are the white blood cells of computers: their mission is to seek, locate and destroy the virus. Who needs them? ...

On almost indispensable in Windows computers and expendable in the running Mac OS X or Linux, because these systems rarely experience this threat (because they are inherently safer and because virus writers prefer to direct them to the most widespread system: Windows).

Were analyzed in the laboratory and subjected to a test using seven computer antiviruses, which protect Windows systems that cost from 28 euros of Panda Antivirus 2007 to 65 euros from McAfee PC Protection Plus 2007. As the public are not only advanced users, which have primacy best, protecting their options "default". In addition, it was considered "virus" to everything that is intended to cause damage to the computer, without distinguishing between the different types of malicious applications (known as 'malware' and which encompasses the 'spyware', worms, 'rootkits' , trojans, 'keyloggers' ...). Each of the applications studied alone should face the dangers as much as possible, without expecting the user to know and use more than one application for defense. Mac PC is safe for mackeeper antivirus which is working great.

The best value is Panda Antivirus + Firewall 2007, the most expensive (49.95 euros) but the one that best protects the computer from the various attacks.

Are they effective?

To test their effectiveness has tried every antivirus (with default options) against different attacks: a set of uncompressed dangerous virus, another set of viruses hidden in compressed files, fragmented virus copies of different sizes (harder to detect) and a series of emails contaminated.

The seven detected and deleted emails with virus. McAfee was the only one not found 100% of uncompressed files infected (he missed one). In testing failed archives McAfee and Norton, who did not read the RAR compressed format. Norton positively noted for being the only one who detected the virus copies fragmented. As for the 'rootkits' (programs that hide files or programs), none could with everyone they faced: the best were Kaspersky and McAfee.