One of the most common phone calls we get at BoxAid is in relation to viruses and trojans. So many of our customers are infected with some kind of malware or virus and they simply want to get rid of it. The interesting statistic is that 98% of the infected machines have a good quality anti-virus product on the computer. The most common anti-virus products are Symantec, McAfee, AVG, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro in that exact order. All of these are paid programs that cost at least $30 a year with the exception of AVG which is free. They are all good programs but inevitably the customer asks, “Why didn’t my anti-virus product stop this?” The simple answer is that there is no solution that is guaranteed to stop all viruses from infecting your PC. The products are about 95% effective since they rely on daily and sometimes hourly updates from the vendor to give you the latest signatures to protect you from the latest viruses. This means if there are 1000 new viruses coming out per day you will be protected from about 950 of them. So what does all this mean? An ounce of prevention is worth its weight in gold (or whatever that cliche is) So the key is never getting infected in the first place and that means being much more careful with the places you visit on the Internet. This is where most of the malware comes from that infects your machine and the virus writers are just waiting for you to slip up so they can infect you.
One of the best ways of avoiding infection is knowing the reputation of a website before you even get to it. This means if you are searching for lyrics to a Beatles song on Google and it returns a page of results you should know the reputation of those pages before you visit any of them. A great free tool for this is McAfee SiteAdvisor which can be found here. When you download and install SiteAdvisor it will add whats known as a browser helper object into IE or Firefox depending on which one you are using. The small box will change colors from red, green or yellow depending on the risk of the website you are on. Below are two great examples.
Green SiteAdvisor Icon
While this is a great feature In this case you can clearly seen the green SiteAdvisor Icon showing you that website you are on is very safe. You can also scroll over the green box to learn more about the site and why McAfee thinks its safe.
Red SiteAdvisor Icon
Over here we can clearly see this website is dangerous by the Red SiteAdvisor Icon. But more importantly we need to make sure we never get to the red website in the first place which avoids us from getting infected.
Google Search Red Site
Finally we can see with SiteAdvisor installed when we do a search on Google (also works with Yahoo) we should notice green, red, and yellow icons at the end of each link in the search results. Now we know the reputation of a website before we ever click on their link. In addition, you can scroll over the red icon and see why the site was rated red to further analyze the data. This is a great tip for all family members and especially kids. By keeping away from the dangerous and malicious sites in the first place you will greatly reduce the risk of your PC getting infected and ultimately keep your data safe.
About George Dover
George Dover is one of the Microsoft Certified Technicians that works at BoxAid.com. He is the primary blog contributor and has helped thousands of customers calling into BoxAid on a daily basis. Connect with me on Google+
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