Good antivirus strategies and the use of defensible antivirus software is critical to protecting your computer these days. Viruses have evolved over time and are now more dangerous than ever. They have grown in sophistication, layered on lessons learned and code written by malicious expert programmers over the years.
Virus development and antivirus protection are important events. What I mean by this is that a virus is created and deployed. Once discovered, antivirus software companies like Symantic, Norton, or McAfee build defenses against the new virus and roll out these updates to customers who use their software.
Companies like Microsoft and Apple also regularly create patches and updates to plug vulnerabilities found in their operating systems and then roll them out to their customer base. As long as there are people and entities with bad intentions, this cycle will continue.
One day you may buy and install antivirus protection software that defends against a number of existing known external threats, but tomorrow something new will come along and it might just work until your antivirus protection software is updated again to protect you. against the new threat, but you’ll only be protected against the new threat if you’re diligent about keeping the antivirus software on your computer as up-to-date as possible. So here’s the first strategy you should employ: Always keep the antivirus software you’ve purchased as up-to-date as possible. When updates are offered, implement them as soon as possible.
The next thing to understand is that there is no antivirus product today that can protect you against everything. So this means that to further minimize the vulnerability of your system, and you can never be totally sure, you also want to keep your computer’s operating system as up to date as possible.
When security updates are offered, keep in mind that they are being offered because new system vulnerabilities have been discovered, and that what you are deploying as an update has been released to help protect your system against these newly found vulnerabilities.
There are many aspects to protecting your computer these days related to the use and operation of antivirus software. First of all, when you update your antivirus software application(s), it’s also not a bad idea to regularly perform a full scan of your hard drive for viruses after the updates have been installed. By doing this, you may find some viruses that you can eradicate that have entered your computer since your last update.
Then, after you complete your updates and drive scans and your system shows you it’s clean at that point, also do a full backup of your system and files. You never know if you’ll have to go back to this backup point at some point in the future if you’re subsequently hacked or if a new virus appears on your drive. Taking regular “System Clean” backups of your systems is one of the best defenses you have against intrusions that cause damage.
By the way, make sure the backups you’re doing are stored on an external device/data drive that you only connected to your computer when you backed up. You do this to prevent viruses from traveling and infecting those external drives as well.
In short, following these steps will go a long way toward protecting your systems and minimizing damage if an intrusion of any kind occurs to gain access to your computer or business network.