Having an antivirus is essential to avoid security problems, such as the entry of viruses, the theft of information or installing software that could cause the system to malfunction. However, it is equally important to check that it really works well. If we have an antivirus that does not perform as it should, it is basically as if we have nothing. Therefore, in this article we are going to give you some guidelines to check if the antivirus works well.
Steps to see if the antivirus works well
It doesn’t matter which antivirus you have installed, as you can always perform tests to see if it works well or not. What you should do is have it up and running so there are no issues. From there you can run a test and see if it performs well to avoid errors when necessary.
Update the antivirus and system
A first step is to make sure that you have the antivirus correctly updated. That means you’ll be able to spot the latest threats and be prepared to take action. Having outdated antivirus can be a major problem and you should always prevent it from happening.
It is also interesting to check that the operating system has the latest version. It does not matter if you use Windows or any other, since you should always have all the updates installed and thus correct possible vulnerabilities.
Remove programs that may interfere
Do you have any other antivirus or security program installed? Although it does not mean that it is bad to have some more security tool, it does mean that there may be conflicts. Therefore, our advice is that you review everything very well and eliminate any software that could cause problems for the antivirus.
In order to carry out a test correctly, if you only have the antivirus running at full capacity it is the best. This way you will avoid those interferences that can affect the test and give bad results.
Try a fake virus
The next thing to do once you have everything ready is to try a fake virus. There are different options on the Internet and basically what they do is test the security software alerts to see if it detects it as a threat and, in this way, they can see that it works well for when it is necessary.
Via Wicar you can download different files and tests to see if the antivirus works well. They are fake viruses, with code that will not cause any harm to your computer. However, they are going to turn on the alarms of the security program and see in this way that it works correctly.
Do you want to risk using a real virus?
But you can go even further. Dare you try a real virus? It is undoubtedly the best test to see if an antivirus is good or not. However, you must take the risk into account and know how to do it properly so that there is not the slightest problem. If you want to do it, keep this in mind:
- Install a virtual machine with Windows
- Create a Windows user account other than Administrator
- Install the latest version of Python
- Download a real virus from GitHub created to test
Although a virus can escape from a virtual machine, it is rare for it to happen. The ideal is to download a file that we know cannot act in this way and, therefore, everything will remain in the virtual machine. So you can see how your antivirus works in case it has to act at any time.
