Antivirus Software Healthy Hints

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Personalized Health Report from CyberFlair Healthy Hints.

Overview

An antivirus program is a must have and can prevent your computer from being infected and can also attempt to clean-up an already infected computer of malicious software.  Such infections are computer programs that when active on a computer can do anything it likes, such as:

• Corrupt, delete or steal your documents, pictures and programs.
• Pretend to be a security solution product and report an infection and request money in order to remove the problem.  Typically these programs are the infection and are holding your computer to ransom.
• Quietly use your computer and Internet connection to send unsolicited emails (SPAM) around the World.  An indication of a slower than normal computer or Internet connection may be an indicator of this happening.
• Monitor your keyboard and web activity recording passwords and login credentials for sites that they can steal assets from you.
• Quietly download additional infections making it more difficult to fully clean.

Antivirus software typically protect you by being a virtual gatekeeper between your computer and the outside world, checking any new data or software for possible infections.  Detection is mainly based on looking for a match against a list of known viruses that the antivirus program will automatically and periodically often download updates to.  These are typically used to protect your computer in the following ways:

• Real-time Monitoring
  Malicious software can only be effective when it's actively being run by your computer.  Therefore antivirus software checks all new programs and data as it's transferred between storage devices, computer memory and the Internet.
• Scheduled Scans
  This is when the antivirus software does a background check of the data on your computer's hard disks to see if any viruses are waiting to be activated.