Antivirus softwers

There are hundreds of antiviruses out there — and they all claim to offer the best protection at the best price. But I tested 67 of the top antivirus software on the market and only a few of them are strong enough, secure enough, and effective enough to be considered one of the best antiviruses of At a minimum, antivirus software needs to include strong virus protection against new and advanced forms of malware — spyware, rootkits, worms, trojans, ransomware, etc.

But most antivirus packages nowadays include more than just an antivirus scanner — they come with features that add additional protection, like a network firewall, a virtual private network VPN , a password manager , and parental controls among a lot of other things.

Because the more secure your device is, the less likely you are to get hacked or expose your sensitive data online. So how do you know which antivirus products offer the best security, the best malware protection, and the best value? I compared the top antiviruses on the market and ranked them on security, functionality, speed, and price.

Norton offers unbeatable virus and malware protection. Norton provides excellent features across all of its packages. While the password manager is not amazing, getting all of this in one package is a really good value for an entry-level, paid antivirus.

Norton provides the best antivirus protection in Norton offers one of the strongest cybersecurity packages around — complete protection from all malicious threats alongside a ton of excellent extra features, like a VPN with unlimited data , a password manager, secure cloud storage, parental controls, and a lot more.

Get Protected with Norton Now. Bitdefender has an extremely advanced antivirus engine — it uses a massive malware database together with machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect and protect against malware more effectively than almost any other competitor on the market.

During my testing, Bitdefender found and removed every single malicious threat from my system. Bitdefender caused virtually zero system impact to both my Windows and Mac laptops, even during intensive, full-disk scans. Similar to Norton , Bitdefender includes advanced settings for users who know how to customize their antivirus protection.

Bitdefender has a very limited free version of its paid antivirus which is just simple malware detection. Bitdefender Total Security offers cloud-based antivirus scanning and a wide range of cybersecurity tools for a cheaper price than most competitors. And you can try out Bitdefender risk-free with a day money-back guarantee. Get Protected with Bitdefender Now. Intego is the best macOS antivirus out there.

And its scans are fast — scanning over , files in under 2 hours. Intego has a few package options. If you need a Windows antivirus, any of the other ones on this list are better choices. Get Protected with Intego Now. TotalAV has an excellent antivirus scanner and a couple of really good extras, all inside a very intuitive dashboard — making TotalAV a particularly great choice for beginner and non-technical users. TotalAV has a powerful antivirus engine and a good range of features inside a user-friendly dashboard — I recommend TotalAV for first-time users just needing something safe, secure, and easy to use.

And all TotalAV purchases have a day money-back guarantee. On the other hand, McAfee has some pretty good extra features. This provides an easy-to-read map of all devices on your home Wi-Fi network, giving you total control over your online security and allowing you to lock out intruders.

I tested every free antivirus I could find against thousands of old and new Windows malware files. I was ultimately able to find 5 free downloads that each offer free virus protection alongside a decent set of free internet security tools. That said, every free antivirus is going to include a few frustrating limitations.

I tested and ranked each free antivirus listed here for malware detection, ease of use, and additional cybersecurity features. Read the full Norton review here. Plus, Windows Defender consistently ranks below the top antivirus scanners in our independent lab testing. The free downloads on this list are from top-notch cybersecurity companies that are offering their premium antivirus protection for free.

And some of the free programs on my list also include additional cybersecurity protections. Free antiviruses like Avira and TotalAV are pretty good, but their paid versions are way better — to begin with, they come with all of the internet security protections you need to stay as safe as possible online.

Together with a malware scanner, these tools are crucial to building a good online defense against hackers, scammers, and predators. Here are a few of them:. Avira Free Security for Windows is my favorite free Windows antivirus in — it has one of the best anti-malware engines on the market, includes more free features than any other competitor, and is really easy to use. Paid programs like McAfee and Norton are equally effective at detecting malware, but their full disk scans will slow down your system much more than Avira will.

The Safe Shopping browser extension for Firefox and Chrome is really good — it blocks suspicious phishing sites, web trackers, and unwanted advertisements.

The extension also automatically recommends links to better deals when shopping online. Download Avira Free Now. Another thing that makes Panda a good choice for Windows users is the Rescue Kit feature, which allows you to download a bootable version of Panda to a USB drive and then use the USB drive to clean an infected PC and get it up and running again. With lightweight malware scanning, an automatic gaming mode, a Rescue Kit, and a VPN, Panda is an excellent free internet security product.

In short, it offers real-time defenses against viruses or other threats, which if detected are immediately dealt with, preventing them from carrying out their destructive payload. As well as this automated protection, you can run manual virus scans whenever you wish. Think of these as the fingerprints of malware, and if something is spotted coming onto your system that has a matching fingerprint, the antivirus leaps into action, quarantining the offender.

For more details on this topic, see our full breakdown of exactly how antivirus software works. The obvious answer is staring you in the face Consult our rankings in this article, which is based on our expert knowledge and thorough, continually updated reviews of the top antivirus players. That said, obviously you also have to bear in mind your own particular needs. Or at the other end of the scale, maybe you have a large family with a ton of devices to protect, and you need a package to cater for that.

Or maybe you want a VPN service as well as antivirus, so a bundled package will save you a lot of money on subscription fees. In short, our recommendations are here as firm guidance, but modify these appropriately based on your individual requirements.

For more thoughts on this, check out our article exploring how to choose the best antivirus. The good news is that the best antivirus products are getting cheaper and cheaper to purchase, and free products are getting more and more effective A good free antivirus — like the ones we recommend on this page below — is a perfectly reasonable option for protecting your PC, with Microsoft Defender now the best we've ever seen it.

That said, premium antivirus programs offer extra features above and beyond the fundamentals. A robust system of parental controls could be a huge win for those with kids, for example. Or a dedicated anti-ransomware layer of protection that only comes with the paid-for product could help catch one of the most dreaded infections and halt it in its tracks.

For more on this, read our full piece on whether free antivirus is enough to protect you. Or just keep scrolling as we reveal today's best free antivirus software providers Paying for a premium service means you get more features like spam filters, parental controls, system scans and advanced firewalls. This makes them more suitable for power users, those who want a bit of extra security and anyone who needs their system to run as smoothly as possible. It also means you avoid annoying pop-ups that try and tempt you to upgrade to the full version.

In fact, these days you can get top quality protection absolutely free, with just about every single major vendor out there offering a free antivirus. Avira Free Antivirus is today's best free security download If you're determined to get free antivirus, we strongly suggest that you go for our pick of best security downloads - Avira Free Antivirus.

We've highlighted its long list of features below, together with information on how well it performs at independent testing labs. A very impressive freebie. That's pretty good for a freebie, and why we have no qualms at all in naming it as our 1 best free antivirus download.

As well as the essential security smarts, we also love the clean, friendly interface and the fact it has a track record of throwing up minimal false positives.

In fact, the list of features reads more like a fully paid premium package. It throws in identity protection, a password manager, anti-scam protection to prevent phishing attempts, and even a PC cleaner to keep your system spick and span. If there's one thing we'd change then it's the tad overeager badgering - although popups and advertisements are very common to free products, and that doesn;t prevent us from wholeheartedly recommending Avira Free Antivirus.

Review and where to download: Avira Free Antivirus. Avast and AVG haven't yet fully merged, despite the former formally acquiring the latter in mid The newly combined company says the two free antivirus products will remain separate, although there's apparently a joint AV package on the way soon. Obviously, though, Avast now has a lot more data to work with, having expanded its effective userbase and, therefore, its threat detection network to a whopping million users.

The latest edition of Avast's free antivirus - now branded Avast One Essential - adds an automatic gaming mode to mute popups and reduce system load when you're firing up a processor-hungry game, which is very handy indeed, and the interface has been given a clean new overhaul. There's a password manager, too, which is an undeniably good addition to your security portfolio.

It scores well on AV-TEST's widespread malware benchmark and continues a clean sweep against 0-day attacks — presumably that expanded detection network is really helping. Less impressive is the slight negative effect Avast has on software launch times, and its slightly popup-heavy attitude. Review and where to download: Avast Free Antivirus. Microsoft Defender formerly Windows Defender was generally seen as a bit of a joke in the not-too-distant past.

It performed terribly by most measures and was a good advert for why you should really pay for antivirus. But as we explain further up this article, Microsoft Defender has come on leaps and bounds and can now legitimately be mentioned in the same company as Bitdefender, Norton and Kaspersky.

As well as very solid virus protection, Defender has extra bits and bobs like a ransomware shield, webcam protection, privacy tools and even basic parental controls and cloud backup. And the best bit No need to download a thing, just find it in your menu and get protected straight away. Read more and see how to use: Microsoft Defender review. The paid-for version of Kaspersky's Windows security software frequently tops charts of best virus prevention solutions and AV-TEST once again gave it full marks across the board in its latest round of testing.

As you would expect, Kaspersky Free is a scaled down version of the full program - a tool that we really like more on which below.

The free version ditches additional features such as privacy protection and safe payment sandboxes to concentrate on powerful, no-frills and - most importantly - free protection for your PC. The result is a tremendously easy to use and navigate bit of software that does an effective job of keeping you protected from viruses. Using the nuts and bolts real-world scanning engine of the paid-for suite, Kaspersky Free is fiendishly hard for viruses and trojan horses to break down.

So instead of letting you cash in on your computer's horsepower, the cryptominers send the collected coins into their own account—not yours. So, essentially, a malicious cryptominer is stealing your device's resources to make money. Exploits are a type of threat that takes advantage of bugs and vulnerabilities in a system in order to allow the exploit's creator to deliver malware.

One of the most common exploits is the SQL injection. Malvertising is an attack that uses malicious ads on mostly legitimate websites to deliver malware. You needn't even click on the ad to be affected—the accompanying malware can install itself simply by loading and viewing the page in your browser. All you have to do is visit a good site on the wrong day. Spoofing occurs when a threat pretends to be something it's not in order to deceive victims to take some sort of action like opening an infected email attachment or entering their username and password on a malicious site spoofed or faked to look like a legitimate site.

Phishing is a type of attack aimed at getting your login credentials, credit card numbers, and any other information the attackers find valuable. Phishing attacks often involve some form of spoofing, usually an email designed to look like it's coming from an individual or organization you trust. Many data breaches start with a phishing attack. The old school method of signature-based threat detection is effective to a degree, but modern anti-malware also detects threats using newer methods that look for malicious behavior.

To put it another way, signature-based detection is a bit like looking for a criminal's fingerprints. It's a great way to identify a threat, but only if you know what their fingerprints look like. Modern anti-malware takes detection a step further so it can identify threats it has never seen before.

By analyzing a program's structure and behavior, it can detect suspicious activity. Keeping with the analogy, it's a bit like noticing that one person always hangs out in the same places as known criminals and has a lock pick in his pocket. This newer, more effective cybersecurity technology is called heuristic analysis. Each time a heuristic anti-malware program scans an executable file , it scrutinizes the program's overall structure, programming logic, and data.

All the while, it looks for things like unusual instructions or junk code. In this way, it assesses the likelihood that the program contains malware. What's more, a big plus for heuristics is its ability to detect malware in files and boot records before the malware has a chance to run and infect your computer. In other words, heuristics-enabled anti-malware is proactive, not reactive.

Some anti-malware products can also run the suspected malware in a sandbox, which is a controlled environment in which the security software can determine whether a program is safe to deploy or not.

Running malware in a sandbox lets the anti-malware look at what the software does, the actions it performs, and whether it tries to hide itself or compromise your computer. Another way heuristic analytics helps keep users safe is by analyzing web page characteristics in order to identify risky sites that might contain exploits. If it recognizes something fishy, it blocks the site. In brief, signature-based anti-malware is like a bouncer at the nightclub door, carrying a thick book of mug shots and booting anyone that matches.

Heuristic analysis is the bouncer who looks for suspicious behavior, pats people down, and sends home the ones carrying a weapon. Two relatively new forms of malware have helped drive the advancement of signature-less detection methods: exploits and ransomware. Though these threats are similar to others in many ways, they can be much harder to detect. Furthermore, once your computer is infected, these threats can be almost impossible to remove. Exploits get their name because they literally exploit vulnerabilities in a system, software, or web browser in order to install malicious code in a variety of ways.

Anti-exploit measures were developed as a shield against this method of attack, protecting against Flash exploits and browser weaknesses, including new exploits that have not been identified or vulnerabilities for which patches have not yet been created.

Ransomware emerged on the malware scene to spectacular effect in Ransomware made a name for itself by hijacking and encrypting computer data, and then extorting payments as it held the data hostage. Originally, both these threats resulted in the development of dedicated anti-exploit and anti-ransomware products. In December , Malwarebytes folded anti-exploit and malicious website antivirus protection into the premium version of Malwarebytes for Windows.

We have since added anti-ransomware for even more advanced anti-malware protection. Artificial intelligence AI and machine learning ML are the latest stars in the top antivirus and anti-malware technology.

AI allows machines to perform tasks for which they are not specifically pre-programmed. AI does not blindly execute a limited set of commands. ML is programming that's capable of recognizing patterns in new data, then classifying the data in ways that teach the machine how to learn. Put another way, AI focuses on building smart machines, while ML uses algorithms that allow the machines to learn from experience. Both these technologies are a perfect fit for cybersecurity, especially since the number and variety of threats coming in every day are too overwhelming for signature-based methods or other manual measures.

Both AI and ML are still in developmental phases, but they hold immense promise. In fact, at Malwarebytes, we already use a machine-learning component that detects malware that's never been seen before in the wild, also known as zero-days or zero-hours. Other components of our software perform behavior-based, heuristic detections—meaning they may not recognize a particular code as malicious, but they have determined that a file or website is acting in a way that it shouldn't.

In the case of business IT professionals with multiple endpoints to secure, the heuristic approach is especially important.