What is Malware? - How to detect and avoid using Malwarebytes

There are times that your antivirus software will not detect all things that can hop aboard your computer while surfing online. You can pick up things from visiting a reputable website without that website having anything to do with what your system picks up. Hackers will plant malicious programs on various sites through Javascript ads and other various means. One of the biggest threats today is malware.

An example that may help give a better perspective on this is what my wife and myself went through a couple of years ago. As AT&T U-verse Internet subscribers, we got the paid for version of McAfee antivirus software for free, included in our internet subscription. To us, that sounded wonderful, as we had always ran the AVG free version of antivirus software in the past. So we both installed the McAfee and went about our business..after uninstalling the free version of AVG.

Within a matter of weeks both of our systems picked up malware that got by the McAfee antivirus software. With my wife's system, total loss! Had to replace her system. With my system, I had to have Dell work on it, as it was under Dell warranty still. The hard drive was trashed.

We got both systems back online and once again, I picked up some kind of malware. I contacted McAfee and they did a remote session with my laptop in an attempt to troubleshoot the matter. After various attempts they downloaded a free version of a software program called Malwarebytes on my machine and scanned my machine. Within minutes, Malwarebytes picked up what McAfee could not find, isolated the malware and solved the problem. What this showed me was that I needed to do two things, install Malwarebytes on all my systems and let McAfee go. I reverted back to the AVG free version for my antivirus protection.

For the next few months my wife and myself encountered no additional problems. We then invested in two licensed versions of Malwarebytes for our main machines, and I keep the free version of Malwarebytes running on my three lab computers.

Two years has come and gone, and none of the machines have had issues since we started running Malwarebytes in tandem with AVG's free version of antivirus. We surf the web tremendously and visit more than the average amounts of sites in the course of a day as we both do various work online that requires such.

Malware is designed to take control of your machine and from my experience, I can vouch that it does the job very well!

If you would like to visit CNET (safe download site), you can download the free version of Malwarebytes by clicking the link. Also, from the CNET site, you can download the free version of AVG antivirus, that I run alongside Malwarebytes.