Basically, the slickness with which a smooth operator can hoodwink you is beyond good browsing ethics. Those days when Windows Defender and Windows Security Updates, alongside staying off anything from the Gray to the Dark Web, were enough are over. Vulnerabilities to the scammers, the spies, the hackers, the inventors of the Trojan Horse, they’re simply a matter of time. Before the extra two-layer security that most emails and social media accounts offer nowadays there were pseudo-hackers, people with basic IT knowledge and a lot of time on their hands that spent anywhere between 8-12 hours a day for 7 months to guess the answers to the security questions under the “Forgot My Password” section. A good example of that kind of commitment is Guccifer 2.0, a hacker who’s still serving time for identity theft.

If regular pseudo-IT-savvy taxi drivers can hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails by means of a 2006 Pentium 4 computer, imagine what genuine prodigies that actually underwent college level IT classes can do. They’re the reason Antivirus companies like Bitdefender, Norton, Eset and the likes are struggling to release a new virus database on a yearly basis. As the rapid rise of the global population made it to 7.7 billion people, the threats coming from the more and more hungry and computer literate hackers of the world have become beyond obvious.

What can an antivirus protect you from? Well, usually a good antivirus comes with a scanning process, a live virus shield or a firewall, a kill switch, a VPN and quarantine. So buying an antivirus might turn out to be a treat. Other than that, competing antivirus companies have implemented rootkit protection, thus stopping deeply seeded rootkits from masking malware in your computer; bot protection, a way to prevent hackers from using your computer from a remote location for their hidden agenda; worm protection, a layer of “you shall not pass” for network attacking, malware carrying worms that will end up costing you a lot of money to remove; Trojan horses – the old and dependable; you can always count on a Trojan horse to ruin that fun night with the gang when instead of GomPlayer for a high quality Lord of the Rings experience you’ve downloaded the most effective computer crasher out there; spyware detection so that your money and your accounts always remain in your possession; messaging protection, or anything related to emails, social media, instant messages, attachments, this keeps you well covered.

So, at the end of the day, just like we eat good food, fresh fruit and try to procure the top health products, keeping us safe, above all, in the Internet era would be a better strategy than to ride blindfolded and try and “treat” your computer after it got infected. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, old Ben Franklin was caught tweeting.

The disease being so widespread, almost everybody knows of or has heard of the existence of both viruses and antiviruses. The former has been the accidental advertisement of the latter, as people who got burnt rapidly searched for a way to ameliorate the damage done. Because owning a PC or a laptop almost definitely implies owning an antivirus, the next item on the agenda would be what antivirus would suit me best?

Just like when buying a car, the first question should come from the needs sector: do I use the internet as a means of getting fast information, as a family thrift or for entertainment purposes, or is my broadband a racing track? The level of protection you need depends on how you use your device.

Whatever the case, continue with this question: what operating system will I be using in the next year or so. You need an antivirus compatible with your operating system. Some antivirus companies keep up with client operating systems and not with server operating systems.

Older computers need to address the performance issue, as some heavy duty antivirus programs will invariably slow down their PC.

There are free antivirus clients, cheap ones, and expensive ones. As with the case of VPN services, we recommend the paid antivirus security. Their updates are a lot more regular, they can pay a handful of programmers to work to their (and your!) benefit, and they usually get to produce more complex and secure software. The paid versions don’t rely on ads to maintain a lifeline, as users pay monthly or yearly subscriptions, and a paid antivirus will incorporate useful features, like parental control, automatic updates, easy, express installations, a recovery module, in case the firewall deletes a file you actually needed, performance enhancement services, customer support, so on and so forth.

Ask yourself if you Visit devious websites, or if you usually reside on the YouTube/Facebook/Pinterest safe lane of the internet. Some of the features you might want to be looking into when buying an antivirus soft, ensuing the answer to this question, are firewall, a powerful program that prevents viruses entering your computer ahead of time, file shredder, something that will completely delete files from your computer (as simply sending them to the Recycle Bin doesn’t make them go away), adware and malware protection, or the new wave of viruses, those that come through the help of internet ads and commercials, phony websites and shady popup pages.

A final step should be comparing antivirus software, and for that purpose we’ve done some research and we came up with a list comprising some of the best offers out there.

First and foremost, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2020 seems to be the door to knock on when it comes to a Windows operated, single device ransomware, malware, adware, spyware, VPN security, for the staggering sum of $24.99/year. That’s 60% off the original $59.99 from last year.

Norton Antivirus Plus with a similar protection, same number of devices covered and an added financial and advanced privacy rig comes to our homes at a mind blowing $19.99/year. That’s $40 off. It covers even the newest types of malware and, unlike Bitdefender, it can go to an all time low of $7.99/month if you choose Norton 360 Standard. For that amount you get Dark Web Monitoring, a no-log policy VPN, real-time protection, password manager, a webcam monitor that stops hackers from peeping through the front mirror and 10 Gigabyte Cloud Backup.

Eset Nod32, another titan in the business, dating back from 1992, it can offer us a very customizable protection with a Ransomware shield, a UEFI scanner against persistent malware, cloud powered scanning that allows us to skip an in-depth scan so that we don’t waste time on regular files that have a generally good rep. All of that comes at a rather pricy $39.99/year, but if you commit to 3 years with them you’ll only be paying, for one device, that is, $79.98. That’s 20 something per year, right? Not too bad, not too shady. At the end of the day, again, the company’s been around.

Kaspersky rounds up automatic scans, anti-cryptomine shields, and a simpler security martrix than our previous Nod32. That’s just $29.99 a year.

Panda Security SL created their Panda Dome Essential back in 1990, when they were dubbed Panda Software. Every old timer remembers their software from back in the day. PC magazines would feature it, some as intermittent as every month, because they had a free product they would use for the advertisement of their – today - €20,99/year(from an earlier 34.99) Panda Essential. It allows the use of one devices over all the five existing platforms, hooks us up with a process monitor, your old and handy URL filtering and a bootable USB rescue drive. Integrated VPN, malware blocking, ransomware prevention, dangerous website blocking, you name it. They’re committed.

So you see, buying an antivirus really boils down to whether or not you’re aiming for a business profile(multiple devices) or a home game, a fully customizable experience or a simpler head-in-the-clouds user relationship. If you’re aiming at the cheap side of the spectrum, somewhere between $19.99/year and $29.99/year should turn any experience on the internet into a stroll through the park.