Proactive about anti-malware

Security tools, and their rapidly changing market, are generally misunderstood. Aside from the tens of thousands of malwares that are newly-released and savaging networks on a daily basis, this ignorance is the number one reason that we succumb to attack.

In fairness to the consumer, confusion is hardly surprising with products offering incapable technologies, a range of plans, and a foggy cloud of marketing hype.

The reactionary old guard: detection

The traditional anti-malware solution has been to have a firewall plus an antivirus scanner. The two-way firewall remains important. The average antivirus on the other hand, while not defunct, should be accepted for what it is: helpful but severely insufficient.

What these antivirus products have given us is protection against known threats and that's accomplished with signature scanning. What they have also added to the arsenal is heuristic scanning, a leap forward to check a file not only against a database but also...