I use Total Defense Premium on my new computer and it ran through a total computer scan the other night and I checked the report and was amazed about the amount of blocked web sites and devious malware hits that it blocked over a little over 8 months that I owned computer. Just goes to show you what attacks are thrown at you each and everyday on the internet. I will be keeping this program. I am satisfied with what I am able to see. Maybe things are getting through but I see no ill effects so far. I am sure the computer techys here can speak to it better than I but glad I have some sort of protection on this thing. What a world we live in. Just throwing this out there.
How often do you download and install things off the internet? This is one of the greatest risks, really...unless you know for sure the site you are downloading from, and what you are downloading, is secure, the general assumption should be that its not. You would be amazed at how many sites and things you can download online that are totally compromised, infected with malware, rootkits, trojans, etc. It is best to avoid installing anything from arbitrary sites on the internet. If you need drivers, it is best to go to the hardware manufacturer's site directly yourself, and download from the source, rather than use third-party driver sites, or driver "investigation" tools (which are pretty much always trojan horses) to find and install "better" drivers, etc. Its also best to avoid utilities and the like, and if you do really need any, it is best to download only from the software developer's site directly.
The other big risk is email, and all the phishing and other malicious emails. Never click links in emails, those can easily be compromised. Sadly, a lot of emails, even from legitimate senders, use third party tracking services that links actually route to first, where they track you, what you clicked on and when, and those sites are often compromised and there is the potential you can get malware from them as well, silently and unbeknownst to you, before you actually get to the website you were expecting. You won't even know this is happening most of the time, as it usually just takes a fraction of a second or so, and you won't usually notice the various different urls you are routed through before you get to the site you were trying to get to.
You can end up riddled with malware in a matter of days or weeks, it doesn't even take months, if you aren't careful.
One other thing to be aware of...sadly, a lot of anti-malware software these days is so egregious themselves, that they can bog down your computer, install their own rootkits (which is no better than a malware rootkit, and those themselves can sometimes become compromised), and they can be so over-bearing on scanning every activity that your computer can come to a crawl. I avoid McAffee, Norton, basically the "big ones" that you might think are the most trustworthy, are usually the worst from a "bog your system down to unusable levels".
I've been using SpyHunter for a while myself. It has never bogged my system down or anything, its scans are low usage and it is very good about finding issues. It has good quarantining, and its heuristics are quite good at detecting potential new (and yet unknown to the security community) viruses (although all such heuristic algorithms can have false positives, nature of the beast.) I can't speak to Total Defense, as I've never used it, but if you find it bogs your system down, there are options out there that will provide solid security without sucking up all your computer's resources. (SpyHunter is not the only one, but I use it on several computers now, and I usually forget its there as it has no impact to the performance of any of my computers, laptop or desktop.)
