There are many different software packages available on the market to protect your devices from viruses, hackers and malware.. To make sure you’re protected from all types of attacks, we’ve prepared a short article on some of the different packages available to protect your devices and what they’ll protect you from!
Antivirus software helps protect your computer against malware and cybercriminals. This program scans through the device’s data — web pages, files, software and applications. It searches for any threats and monitors how programs behave, flagging suspicious behaviour. Once it has spotted this behaviour or threat the antivirus software will attempt to block it or delete it and fight it straight away to keep your data safe, often without the user even realising.
A firewall monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and permits, or blocks data files based on a set of security rules. Its purpose is to establish a barrier between your internal network and traffic from or to external sources (such as the internet) to block malicious traffic like viruses and hackers. This can be software on your PC, laptop or tablet or built into hardware, such as your router.
Anti-malware software protects from attacks such as spyware, adware, and worms. These are often called PUPs or Potentially Unwanted Programs. It scans the system for all types of malicious software and can also alert if a PUP is being downloaded or installed.
Anti-phishing software attempts to identify phishing content contained in websites, e-mail, or other forms used to access data (usually from the internet) and block the content, usually with a warning to the user (and often an option to view the content regardless). It is often integrated with web browsers and email clients as a toolbar that displays the real domain name for the website the viewer is visiting, to prevent fraudulent websites from masquerading as other legitimate websites.
Often these individual programs are packaged up as one software subscription. This is the best way to protect your device as installing several different types of security software can cause conflicts between them, due to the nature of how they work. This can cause systems to be become very slow and unresponsive, blocking genuine applications from running and even make a it unusable.
In the current situation there have been a lot of scams and attempted attacks on devices, as people working from home might have access to valuable work data. In addition, people are purchasing more goods online and doing more Internet Banking Having good software protection will ensure you only are using legitimate websites that will receive your details and will help to keep any work information safe.
For more information about how to keep your systems secure, please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask any questions! We’re a very friendly team that are always happy to help.
