Friday, June 15, 2018

security - Is an antispyware really necessary?


I've been always running frequent antivirus scans on my computers, more because I am a security freak than because I really need them (I'm not one of those users that, after a browsing session, manage to fill their PCs with unknown stuff from unknown websites).


However, I almost never run antispyware scans, especially because they tend to consider too many things as malicious even if they are not. Is it really necessary to have an antispyware program beside an antivirus program, or is an antivirus enough?


Answer



Well, your question isn't very objective, but I'll answer it anyway.


It really depends. If you are a person that downloads things quite frequently, even from a secure source, then you might still want anti-spyware. Anti-Spyware has different uses than Anti-Virus. Spyware is much harder to detect, as it doesn't really behave like a normal virus. Spyware is meant to hide behind an actual application usually, that is why programs tend to detect it even if it is legitimate.


Also, if you use your computer for storing important documents, then it might be worth the hassle.


However, I would say for average use, it is quite unnecessary. Most anti-virus has some anti-spyware anyway. I will recommend AVG Free, probably the best Security program I have found for that price.


No comments:

Post a Comment

hard drive - Leaving bad sectors in unformatted partition?

Laptop was acting really weird, and copy and seek times were really slow, so I decided to scan the hard drive surface. I have a couple hundr...