Selecting Anti-Virus or Malware Protection Software

If you are tasked with selecting an appropriate Anti-Virus or Malware protection software suite, you might find it difficult to find relevant, non-biased resources on the Internet. While I cannot guarantee that any of the following resources aren’t biased, you should be able to come to some sort of decision, with the right information and some of your own testing. After all, there are a lot of solutions out there, and narrowing it down can be a difficult task. To get you started, ask yourself a few basic questions:

  • Does the anti-virus solution support the operating system and software I am currently using?
  • Is the software available as a test/trial download?
  • Is help available online via a forum or knowledgebase?

If the software doesn’t meet any of the above basic requirements, cross it off the list and move on. Next question, how does the product rate with the community? Check out the following voting and testing resources:

  • Windows Security – Look for Reader’s Choice for the current (and previous) year
  • AV Comparatives – Check out their detailed reports
  • AV Test – Check out their detailed reports in the certification section
  • Anti-Malware Test – Make sure your product is an award winner
  • Virus Bulletin – Check out the latest comparative or register for more (registration is free)

If you know of any other great resources, please post a comment. Once you have verified the community response to the list of products you have, it’s onto testing. By now you should have a fairly short list, maybe two or three to install in a lab and test the software by installing and configuring it.

Popular posts from this blog

Get local computer UUID/GUID using Windows Powershell

gPLink and gPOptions

PSLoggedOn Getting Started on Windows Server 2008 R2