Updating your Antivirus, Malware and Adware software. Be prepared!

I was out on a service call today troubleshooting a small network. One of the things I mentioned to my client was that the antivirus software should be updated on all his machines. His response was that all his software was set to auto-update. Now this would be just fine if they always auto-updated. But, from my experience, I can not count how many times I have clicked on "update" or "update now" on various programs that had previously been set to automatically update, only to learn that there was one or more updates sitting there needing to be downloaded.

A very strong warning to all who are online..take the time once a week to simply check for updates on your software..mainly your antivirus/malware/adware software as well as Microsoft Update if you are running a M/S system. Even that has failed to auto-update on my machines. These all deal with security issues, and that is a big concern...either from getting malware, viruses, or other unwanted things taking over your machine, to a hacker finding a way in to catch what you type and learn your passwords and such to other places you may visit online.

Update, update, update..... very important...and a few minutes a week of your time could save you a chunk of change from NOT having to call me out to remove such things off of your machine that have slipped in due to not keeping updated.

An addition to this post that I would like to make is don't be secure just running your antivirus software. There are things out there that are not viruses that will get past your antivirus software...this is called Malware. Now, true, malware does encompass viruses, but there are other things out there besides viruses that will attack your machine.

What I have done is added Malwarebytes to all my machines... my main laptop, all my lab machines and my wife's p/c. This was after we lost two systems to malware attacks and we had to replace both. I was introduced to Malwarebytes by McAfee, when they could not clean my machine even by using remote access...they installed the free version of Malwarebytes to find what McAfee could not locate.. It found it and eliminated the problem. This was well over two years ago, and all my machines have not had problems since then. I liked it so well that not only do I run the free version on my lab computers, but on my main machine and my wife's machine, we purchased a licensed version. You can download the free version here, securely from a well known and trusted safe download site, cnet: Malwarebytes Anti-Malware . Be sure to use the green download button on the LEFT side of your screen.