A Guide For Choosing The Best Antivirus For Your PC Or Mac

The world of computer viruses and antivirus has evolved quite a bit over the years. These days it’s very rare that we come across a virus or other digital intrusion that threatens to destroy our computers. Most antivirus is able to handle these problems without a hitch, and that’s largely because they’ve had to evolve to deal with larger threats, such as rootkits, trojans, and more.

Some of the early and best antivirus back in the day was McAfee and Norton, though there are many more competitors now in 2016. But, only just a few years ago were they both good programs for getting rid of the common virus or piece of malware. While they were able to handle those common problems just fine, viruses and other computer intrusions evolved, requiring more advanced and protective software.

Now, antivirus must be able to quickly and effectively deal with things like rootkits, spyware, adware, trojans, ransomware, and much more. And software like Norton and McAfee have all evolved very well to take care of things like these, but they’re no longer the go-to solution, as the competition has gotten thicker.

The Early Stages Of Antivirus Software

Viruses and malicious software in the 1980s wasn’t very common, this is particularly because the Internet didn’t really go public until around 1989. And even then, it wasn’t until years later that it started becoming widely known and used. Either way, antivirus tools weren’t really needed back then. In fact, Norton launched at tool in 1985 called Norton Utilities. Its goal wasn’t really protecting you against malicious attacks, but to help manage your computer better, whether that be recovering lost files or optimizing the computer to increase speeds. It wasn’t until 1991 when Norton actually provided its first piece of virus removal software.

That’s not to say that viruses weren’t around pre-internet. In fact, they were. One popular one was known as the Creeper virus, which was intended to infect PDP-10 mainframe computer that operated on the TENEX operating system. Ray Tomlinson, the man accredited to creating email, created a virus called The Reaper intended for removing the Creeper virus. That said, viruses were alive and well, but nowhere near as common as we see them today.

Viruses became very commonplace in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is also when some of the first pieces of antivirus software became available, such as John McAfee’s VirusScan and Ross Greenberg’s FluShot Plus. As mentioned earlier, another one that appeared in 1991 was Norton Antivirus. All of these programs at the time were very basic, intended for getting rid of, well, basic viruses. Some of these viruses would steal hard disk space (still do, but in much larger capacity), steal CPU time, access private information, corrupt data and more. Viruses today do much of the same thing, but they weren’t anywhere close to as large scale as we have them now.

Viruses over the years have expanded to include  spyware, adware, trojans, ransomware, and oh so much more. The goal of these viruses hasn’t changed since their inception during the pre-internet days, though. The goal is to still very much steal private information, steal identities, corrupt data, and other harmful things. Only, they’ve become much more sophisticated, and as a result, antivirus software has also become much more sophisticated.

Antivirus software had to become more sophisticated to deal with these threats, but even then, they often weren’t enough. That’s where specialized software came in, such as rootkit scanners like F-Secure and Spyware removal applications like CounterSpy. Even our antivirus tools in 2016 aren’t enough for some threats out on the World Wide Web, and that’s why specialized software has become such a big thing within the antivirus industry, such as Malware Bytes (more on that later).