This year, our group test has conspicuously focused on top-of-the-range security suites, brimming with extra features. Think VPNs, parental controls, password managers, identity theft insurance and recovery services. We included only one free antivirus suite, Windows Defender Antivirus, because it’s both the operating system default and a solid benchmark against which to judge all the others, even if its performance in detection tests suffered a minor slump during the latter half of 2023.
However, a key takeaway from these reviews is that, although these extra tools can help you retain your online privacy or even provide a second layer of detection, the core malware-detection engines remain the same across most vendors’ different tiers.
That means that, when it comes to pure malicious software detection, Avast Free is as effective as…
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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2024