When it comes to Anti Virus software there is certainly plenty to choose from, and its pretty safe to say that most anti virus solutions offer the same thing; protection against viruses and malware. Sure, you can get all-in-one security solutions which include firewalls, web filters and spyware protectors, but the anti virus engine is the main core of the program in most cases.

I will have to admit that up until a couple years ago I had never heard of Avira, for me the only Anti Virus manufactures Id heard of were Mcafee, Kaspersky and Symantec (Norton.. eww) but I thought it was time to try something new. I have now been using Avira for over a year now and I am not planning on changing anytime soon!

Features – Avira is nice and straight forward, it offers reliable anti virus protection but also protection against the following; adware, spyware, dialers, double-extension files, phishing, security privacy risks and unusual runtime compression. This list covers most risks that you could be exposed to online and keeps you covered for the more intelligent virus developers who try and bypass anti virus software. Avira has an auto update feature to keep your virus definitions up to date. As well as this you can create your own exceptions list, more about that below. The scanning engine is fast and a full computer scan is performed quite quickly (dependent on how many files you have). Like most Anti Virus software you can set default actions for when it finds a virus and you can set it to auto delete or auto quarantine for example.

Detection Engine – The one thing that has really stood out with Avira is the detection engine, there have been several cases where Avira has detected a malicious file that other anti virus’s wouldnt have done, this means that there have been several times where I potentially could have been infected if I hadnt been using  Avira. A good way to test this is to use a site like virustotal.com, basically you upload a file to their site and it scans it with 32 different anti virus solutions, you can then see which of those detected a virus and which didnt!

When Avira think’s its found a virus or malicious piece of software you are presented with the following dialog:

When this happens you are forced to take action, all other processes are paused until you respond to this (which is a very good security feature) Your choices are straight forward, and for the most part you are going to want to delete the suspect file. The one thing about Avira is that sometimes it can get a bit trigger happy when it comes to detecting files. For example I have several tools I use such as port scanners and password revealers (for when people forget their passwords) and Avira detects them as hack tools. Luckily this is where the exception feature comes in handy and you can prevent Avira from constantly notifying you that the files are malicious.

Appearance – Avira has a very clean and simple interface and that is what I like about it. I have always hated when software companies bloat their software and make the interface too graphically intense (hmm, norton anyone?) but with Avira the interface is smooth and simple, it responds fast and everything is easy to access. Everything you could need to configure is configurable. A log file is kept of important events such as when a virus was found and what action was taken, you can also view reports for these kind of events although this is generally something you dont really need with a home solution.

As you can see the interface is straight forward and the front screen displays the most important information you need to see.

The good thing about Avira is that it will leave you alone and get on with what it has to do, it will only disturb you if its important (i.e its found a virus or it cant update) you can even set default actions as ive mentioned before which will mean you get disturbed even less!

The only bad thing about Avira is the advertisements, at least once a day you will get a popup advertising the paid solution, whilst this is a slight inconvenience I will admit that its worth it for such a robust and reliable anti virus solution. I would go as far as to say that the paid solution could well be worth the money, although im unsure as to what the differences between the free and paid versions are.

Overall Avira is great, im pretty sure its saved my skin many times where other Anti Viruses would have failed me! It runs fast, it doesnt hassle you too much and best of all its free!

Malware, spyware, adware, whatever-ware is all round us on the internet, its no secret and its getting harder to avoid it. It can range from tracking cookies to full blown rootkits and keyloggers.

Avoiding badware (this is what im going to call it for the rest of this article!) can be tough but there are several things you can do to protect yourself.

Note: No anti virus / software solution will ever give you 100% protection from badware, the creators of badware are a lot smarter than you think and avoiding detection from some anti virus engines is very easy for them!

So, with that being said if you follow these following tips you can avoid being another statistic for anti-malware companies.

1: Be careful what sites you visit. This one is common sense for most people, if your surfing suspect sites trying to download things you shouldnt be then be prepared to face the consequences. A lot of sites will ‘drop’ badware into your system, most the time without you knowing, regardless of what anti virus you have on your machine.

2: Pick a secure browser. I wont go into the detailed explanation of why Firefox is better than Internet Explorer, it just is! Use it and never look back, most web exploits are targetted at Internet Explorer (especially older versions) and will not work on browsers such as Firefox or Opera.

3: Use virustotal.com If you’ve downloaded a file that you think might be suspect then never trust your anti virus to give a 100% accurate result, as I mentioned before hackers can easily crypt files and prevent your Anti Virus from detecting them as a virus. Virustotal.com is a online scanning service that uses 32 different anti virus scanning engines to scan the file! Whilst this is still not 100% effective, there is usually at least 1 anti virus engine out there that will detect a badware file.

4: Use a good AV/Anti-Malware solution. I know, I know, i’ve just said that no anti virus will ever offer you 100% protection and whilst this is true some are better than others! If I had to recommend I would use either Kaspersky or Antivir (Antivir is free) and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. The real time protection from your AV will offer a decent level of protection and its worth running weekly or if your over paranoid daily scans of your system with both pieces of software.

5: Check your task manager / netstat. This is a bit more of an advanced technique which I will cover properly in a seperate article. Task manager will display all your running processes, its a good idea to get familiar with it and check what is running on your machine. Do a google search for the processes to find out what they do and whether or not they are legit. If your familiar with using a command prompt then try typing in netstat and press enter. Netstat will display a list of a incoming and outgoing connections from you machine, this is handy if you want to see any rogue ones that shouldnt be there. It’s a good idea to run this when your machine has first started up as most the time there shouldnt be any (or very few) connections present.

Well thats it for now, whilst these 5 tips are not 100% effective against all badware they will certainly help you and give you a more secure online presence.