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Privacy: Free antivirus software has all of the above problems and adds privacy concerns.

Performance: Antivirus software is notorious for slowing down computers, blocking the best security features of other apps (such as in the Firefox and Chrome browsers), popping up with distracting reminders and upsells for subscriptions or updates, and installing potentially insecure add-ons such as browser extensions without clearly asking you for permission.

As TechRepublic explains, “Security software necessarily requires high access privileges to operate effectively, though when it is itself insecure or otherwise malfunctioning, it becomes a much higher liability due to the extent to which it has control over the system.” Symantec and Norton, Kaspersky, and most other major antivirus vendors have all suffered from critical vulnerabilities in the past.

Vulnerabilities: The nature of how antivirus apps provide protection is a problem.

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So why shouldn’t you install a full antivirus suite from a known brand, just to be on the safe side? For many good reasons: Technically, all viruses are a kind of malware, but not all pieces of malware are viruses. In contrast, antivirus is an out-of-date term that software makers still use because viruses, Trojan horses, and worms were huge, attention-getting threats in the 1990s and early 2000s.

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Although antivirus firms constantly update their detection systems to outwit crypting services, they’ll never be able to keep up with malware makers intent on getting through.Ī quick terminology primer: The word malware just means “bad software” and encompasses anything that runs on your computer with unintended and usually harmful consequences. It's insufficient for a security app to just protect against a single set of known “viruses.” There is a potentially infinite number of malware variations that have been crypted-encoded to look like regular, trusted programs-and that deliver their system-breaking goods once opened.

Why we don’t recommend a traditional antivirus suite For guidance, check out our full guide to setting up all these security layers.

You should avoid downloading and opening email attachments unless you know what they are.

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You need to be mindful of what you download and to download software only from official sources, such as the Microsoft App Store and Apple Mac App Store, whenever possible. You also need secure passwords, two-factor logins, data encryption, systemwide backups, automatic software updates, and smart privacy tools added to your browser.

No antivirus tool, paid or free, can catch every malicious bit of software that arrives on your computer. Over the years, we’ve also spoken with security experts, IT professionals, and the information security team of The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company) to filter out the noise of the typical antivirus table-tennis headlines: Antivirus is increasingly useless, no, actually it’s still pretty handy, no, antivirus is unnecessary, wait, no, it isn’t, and so on.Īlthough in any category we usually test all the products we’re considering, we can’t test the performance of antivirus suites any better than the experts at independent test labs already do, so we relied on their expertise.īut ultimately, relying on any one app to protect your system, data, and privacy is a bad bet, especially when almost every antivirus app has proven vulnerable on occasion. We also read up on the viruses, ransomware, spyware, and other malware of recent years to learn what threats try to get onto most people’s computers today. We spent dozens of hours reading results from independent labs like AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, feature articles from many publications such as Ars Technica and PCMag, and white papers and releases from institutions and groups like Usenix and Google’s Project Zero.

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Windows Defender, Microsoft’s built-in tool, is good enough for most people. The “best antivirus” for most people to buy, it turns out, is nothing. And after all that, we learned that most people should neither pay for a traditional antivirus suite, such as McAfee, Norton, or Kaspersky, nor use free programs like Avira, Avast, or AVG. We set out to do a standard Wirecutter guide to the best antivirus app, so we spent months researching software, reading reports from independent testing labs and institutions, and consulting experts on safe computing.