How to prevent viruses

In today's environment what is the ideal method to staying away from getting your Personal computer attacked with viruses? I lay out several basic steps an individual can consider to ensure infections, trojans, keyloggers as well as other nasties do not take control of your own Computer.

After investing several years evaluating protection solutions I've discovered an essential lesson. Do not get contaminated by adware and spyware.

In other words, put highest effort directly into preventing infection instead than detecting and getting rid of infection.

This statement might seem bland and unremarkable but there's more to this than you feel.

The conventional way of incorporating extra protection.

Quite a few people protect their own Computers through utilizing multiple personal scanning devices based on anti-viruses, anti-spywares, anti-trojans as well as anti-rootkits.

This is not as safe as several people believe as well as for most people, the expense is too high as well as the additional safety given too little.

The price here is not really so much financial although that is actually an problem, but instead the severe impact including many protection layers may have upon the performance of your own Computer.

Presently there is actually also a cost in complexity. The more security applications you run the more opportunity these people may either interfere with each other or even with other applications.

Each extra layer you include increases your safety but by an step-by-step quantity only. A good anti-virus plan might offer 70% safety. Adding a great anti-spyware utility might increase this to 85%. The addition of a good anti-trojan may get it to 90%.

This is because the current protection items overlap within function significantly much more compared to they used to. A modern-day anti-virus program will identify a great deal of spyware although a modern day spyware software will certainly detect some viruses, worms and trojans.

Although the safety achieved only will go up incrementally with each level added, the producing stress on your own Pc may increase more or even much less in percentage to the number of levels. Therefore adding a good anti-spyware layer to your own anti-virus layer will double the actual load on your Personal computer. Including in a good anti-trojan as nicely may well three-way it.
So folks, while layering is a good thing we are faced here with a law of diminishing returns.

But that's not the only problem with the traditional layering approach to protection. If an aggressive malware program is allowed to run on your PC it may disable all your layers of protection rendering them useless.

I've seen it happen many times and it is a frightening sight to see all your security program icons disappear from the system tray.

Thankfully some security programs resist termination by hostile agents but the majority don't. And even those that do resist may well prove vulnerable to new, more advanced termination methods yet to be developed by malware programmers.

My approach these days is simple: if you allow malware programs to run on your PC don't expect your security programs to fully protect you. If you are lucky they will but with security, you shouldn't rely on luck.
For me, the days of running five or more active security software products on my PCs are over. So your Grandmother was right: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.