![]() ![]() And these days, Windows Defender provides a perfectly palatable level of protection to get by with. So it’s a rather dangerous assumption to make that safe surfing habits and other good practices are all you need.īesides, less tech-savvy users may not be all that confident about knowing how to stay safe online anyway, so would be seriously ill-advised to go without antivirus protection.Īnd for those who don’t particularly want to go to the effort of researching and trying to find the best antivirus out there, at least on Windows 10 PCs, you’re already protected by default via Windows Defender. Moving on to consider the potential slowdown that might be visited on your PC by installing an antivirus, the trick here is to check out our antivirus reviews to discover the lean apps which have little impact on system performance – there are some very streamlined products out there (like Norton and Kaspersky, for instance).Īs for the argument that being careful about what you download and click on is enough to keep you safe, well, that’s true to a large extent, but here’s the rub: even if you’re clued-up and super-safe, there’s always a slight chance that you might come a cropper if you’re online with absolutely no protection.Įven legitimate big-name websites can unintentionally become vehicles for malware via the adverts they serve, if the advertising networks who they’ve partnered with are compromised (this has happened to some high-profile sites in the past). It’s that simple – although also bear in mind that to minimize any risk at all, use one of the best apps out there which are pieces of software that benefit from being tightly and securely coded. So really, the good that these apps are doing in that respect far outweighs any potential bad in terms of possible flaws within the security of the antivirus itself. The thing is, it’s these major targets which are the real pay dirt for malware authors, and an antivirus can defend you against those far more dangerous threats. We’re talking about gaping holes in operating systems, and much more widely used software like web browsers, which will be far juicier propositions to exploit for hackers and other miscreants. In truth, there are far bigger targets for malicious actors to focus on than any given security app. Antivirus for the winĬlearly the most worrying issue raised in the above section is the final point, so it’s worth clarifying that the chances of your antivirus being used as an avenue of attack in some manner are pretty slim. However, there are much stronger reasons as to why you should use an antivirus, which we’ll explore next. So, as you can see, there are some gray areas when it comes to answering the question of whether you should run an antivirus. That’s a legitimate concern, as we’ve seen in recent times, when for example in March 2020, Avast disabled a major part of its antivirus software which suffered from a dangerous vulnerability that a respected security researcher flagged up. ![]() In other words, the potential irony is that your antivirus software could be an avenue for your machine to be compromised. Another more pressing worry aired in recent times is that some of the antivirus software out there carries a number of vulnerabilities, and these could be a potential avenue of exploitation for an attacker. ![]()
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