Question

How many different types of viruses/malware/ransomeware etc have you personally had experience with? What types of software and processes do you use to combat infections on your own personal machine? Do you have something that runs locally on your PC/MAC or do you rely on network security tools like a firewall?

If you could give advice to a colleague, what would it be to better protect your systems from virus infections?

Answer 1

I have not experienced a lot but yes malwares like trojan horse, worm and computer virus were a part of my PC for very long time. This incident that I am talking about has happened about 8 years ago and at that point of time I used cracked version of AVG antivirus. That software was not able to protect my PC as it continuously wanted to update it self and 8 years before upgraded cracked versions were not readily available. Some years ahead I bought a original windows 8 and it had in built security system called windows defender along with its windows firewall system. Since then I was using windows defender to protect my PC and I didn't experienced any issues related to malwares/ ransomware .Until that 2017 wannaCry ransomware attack in which many people using original windows were attacked and got there systems encrypted. I was lucky that my system was not targeted in that attack but thereafter I bought Nortan antivirus software because they were the first to release a patch to secure the systems form this attack and also because they were one the oldest in this market .Since then I haven't faced any problem regarding malwares/ ransomware affecting my PC.

So if I have to advice a colleague I would suggest him to buy a good antivirus software (like Nortan, avast, kaspersky etc) and keep updating it for better results. Don't just rely on windows defender and firewall because we have already seen how much security does firewall provide to our PC.