It’s a question that I’m asked regularly and it’s not an easy one to answer. In order to give an unbiased opinion as to which one I would recommend, we need to firstly determine what you mean by “best”. You see, for some people best means ‘cheapest’, for others best means ‘easiest to use’ but for most, I suspect, best means ‘the most efficient at protecting against viruses’.
We all (us techies) have our favourites of course, but every now and then it‘s a sensible idea to take a step back and review the field and see if your preferred product is still performing as well as it should be and this is what we are going to look at this month.
I’ve done a number of reviews on AntiVirus products over the years and based on what I have found, I have adjusted my recommendations accordingly. We should all be willing to change our minds when new evidence is presented that challenges our currently held beliefs, shouldn’t we? In order to try to remain independent, I have used two AntiVirus review companies – www.av-test.org and www.av-comparatives.org. Both companies perform regular reviews of AntiVirus products and publish their findings (the lastest results from these two are June and July 2018 respectively).
Concentrating on ‘protection’ as the definition for ‘best’, av-test.org confirm my current recommendations of Avast Free as a top product for those that prefer not to not pay for their antivirus and Kaspersky Internet Security as the product for those that don’t mind paying for their AntiVirus. The other independent testing company av-comparatives.org also bear out these conclusions. Of course there are a great number of other great products available that do equally as well as those products that I recommend – McAfee Internet Security (it’s a paid-for product) for example performed just as well as Kaspersky in the last two months of testing so is just as good and you certainly shouldn’t consider jumping ship until you do your own research – that’s my aim really, to give you the tools to do your own research and make up your own mind as to which product to use.
So, what else should you be doing? Well if you are unlucky enough to get a virus on your computer (remember there are no AntiVirus products out there that can protect you from everything, there are new viruses being released all of the time and the AntiVirus guys are always one step behind) then you will need to rely on your backups – remember them? Make sure that you know how to protect any data that is important to you and critically that you also know how to get that data back. You know you should be backing things up but most people in my experience (understandably) shy away from doing them for fear of doing something wrong. If you’re shown properly, performing backups is a simple, straight forward task that you can do on a regular basis.