The Members Forum

Having an anti-virus on your computer systems is one of the standard best practices for every computer user, regardless of whether you are home user or a business.

Although there are a lot of users (both corporate and home users) that consider the anti-virus a useless weapon, it still provides a very real protective layer on your computers. No anti-virus is 100% effective, but even at 80% effectiveness, it means a whole lot less problems with malware.

Here are some simple guidelines for selecting and managing your anti-virus environments:

Home Environment

Managing an anti-virus in a home environment is relatively easy. Most users have 2-4 computers in the home, and they need to set-up an anti-virus on everyone of them. The most important elements are

• Regular updating of signatures from the manufacturer
• Active real-time protection
• Regular (weekly or monthly) scheduled scan

In order to keep your home anti-virus system in good condition, you need to

• Set the antivirus to perform automatic cleaning with quarantine (no delete) - this way even if you get a false positive, the file isn't deleted and you can rescue it from
• Check the update version - check whether updates are still current and there are no issues with updating
• Review the last scan results - this way you will be alerted if malware is identified
• Review the quarantine - to find if false positive files were captured by the anti-virus and need to be 'rescued'

Shortinfosec.net has the article HERE!