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The Inter­net space is teem­ing with virus­es. Some of them can “kill” the sys­tem in just a sec­ond, oth­ers block access to impor­tant data and give the attack­er a rea­son for black­mail and extor­tion, and some are cre­at­ed for the sake of a cru­el joke and scare users with a sharp sound at the most unex­pect­ed moment. One thing unites them: no one would want to shel­ter them on their per­son­al com­put­er.

There are also rel­a­tive­ly harm­less virus­es. They don’t care about the pri­va­cy of the vic­tim — these species either sim­ply clog and slow down the sys­tem, or secret­ly use com­put­er resources and mine cryp­tocur­ren­cy for the real own­er. These are the so-called “min­er virus­es”, which have appeared recent­ly with the rise in the price and pop­u­lar­i­ty of bit­coin. Few peo­ple are hap­py with them either, because they accel­er­ate the wear of indi­vid­ual com­po­nents, degrade per­for­mance and take up space on the dri­ve.

Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da ranked the best antivirus­es for Win­dows in 2022 and talked about their strengths, weak­ness­es, and main fea­tures.

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Editor’s Choice

Dr.Web Security Space

Dr.Web anti-virus for PC (Win­dows, Lin­ux, macOS) will pre­vent virus­es and mal­ware from enter­ing the pro­tect­ed sys­tem, as well as cure virus­es that have already pen­e­trat­ed. The pro­gram pre­vents theft of funds, the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­fi­den­tial data and pro­tects the device from all kinds of attacks and threats. The soft­ware has a large updat­ed data­base with data on var­i­ous virus­es, which is updat­ed both by users and virus ana­lysts, and auto­mat­i­cal­ly.

The prod­uct also has a set of pre­ven­tive pro­tec­tion tech­nolo­gies and, through the use of the Dr.Web Cloud, allows you to detect new threats that have not yet man­aged to get into the gen­er­al virus data­bas­es. .

Edi­tor’s Choice

Dr.Web Secu­ri­ty Space

Com­pre­hen­sive PC pro­tec­tion against Inter­net threats

High-qual­i­ty fil­ter­ing of dan­ger­ous sites with pre­ven­tive pro­tec­tion tech­nol­o­gy on com­put­ers with any per­for­mance

Check priceOther prod­ucts

Main characteristics

Lan­guages	Russ­ian, Eng­lish, Ger­man, French, Span­ish, Kaza­kh, Chi­nese, Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Por­tuguese, Pol­ish, Ukrain­ian, Turk­ish, Ara­bic, Viet­namese, Far­si
License type	boxed ver­sion, elec­tron­ic license, sub­scrip­tion
Pur­pose	PC
Min­i­mum RAM Require­ments	0.5 GB

Pros and cons

Thor­ough fil­ter­ing of dan­ger­ous sites, suit­able for com­put­ers with any per­for­mance, sub­scrip­tion option, free demo peri­od

Need addi­tion­al set­tings after down­load

Top 10 best antiviruses for Windows in 2022 according to KP

1. Dr. Web Katana

Dr.Web Katana is an addi­tion­al pro­tec­tion to an already installed antivirus from anoth­er man­u­fac­tur­er (com­pat­i­ble with all antivirus­es). The soft­ware is a set of new gen­er­a­tion Dr.Web tech­nolo­gies designed to pro­tect against attacks and threats that are not rec­og­nized by the main anti-virus pro­gram installed on the PC.

The prin­ci­ple of oper­a­tion of the soft­ware is based on non-sig­na­ture search meth­ods (it detects and pre­vents not a spe­cif­ic virus, but char­ac­ter­is­tic mali­cious actions), virus neu­tral­iza­tion and cloud pro­tec­tion tech­nolo­gies even with­out con­nect­ing a PC to the Inter­net. The anti-virus rec­og­nizes forced changes to files, finds unwant­ed actions of mali­cious pro­grams (for exam­ple, ran­somware) and pre­vents them from infil­trat­ing the device’s work process­es.

The main advan­tages of Dr.Web Katana are ful­ly auto­mat­ed pro­tec­tion and min­i­mal sys­tem load. For cor­rect oper­a­tion, the user only needs to pay and install the pro­gram from the offi­cial web­site.

Main characteristics

Lan­guages	Russ­ian, Eng­lish, French, Ger­man, Span­ish and oth­ers
License type	boxed ver­sion, license and media, license only
Pur­pose	PC, tablet (Win­dows OS)
Min­i­mum RAM Require­ments	100 MB

Pros and cons

Light­weight and unde­mand­ing, effec­tive­ly stops virus­es at the time of acti­va­tion, com­pat­i­ble with any oth­er antivirus

Users have com­plaints about UI/UX inter­face design

Edi­tor’s Choice

Dr. Web Katana

Non-sig­na­ture antivirus for effec­tive PC pro­tec­tion

Addi­tion­al soft­ware to pro­tect against active attacks and new threats that are not rec­og­nized by the main antivirus

Check priceOther prod­ucts

Parental con­trol pro­grams

Chil­dren find it nat­ur­al to get a smart­phone before they learn to read and write

2. ESET NOD32 TITAN version 2

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the NOD32 fam­i­ly per­fect­ly neu­tral­izes mal­ware, virus­es and encrypt­ed dan­ger­ous pro­grams. You will find a tra­di­tion­al­ly friend­ly inter­face, a log­i­cal struc­ture and func­tions, the oper­a­tion of which is under­stand­able even to a per­son far from com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy.

Pro­tects the user’s per­son­al data, ensures the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty and secu­ri­ty of infor­ma­tion, saves part of the disk for online recov­ery and increas­es the reli­a­bil­i­ty of stay­ing on sites for com­mu­ni­ca­tion between users.

The Inter­net child con­trol pro­gram allows you to block access to cer­tain sites and infor­ma­tion by cat­e­go­ry, and “anti-spy­ware” pro­tects against “back­door” appli­ca­tions (pro­grams for access­ing a PC by bypass­ing authen­ti­ca­tion), down­load­ers, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, pass­word crack­ers, key­board inter­cep­tors and proxy servers.

The pro­gram is sup­plied both in dig­i­tal form and on remov­able Flash media, which allows you to install it even on a com­put­er with­out an Inter­net con­nec­tion. Par­tic­u­lar­ly inat­ten­tive users should be care­ful: there is a “red but­ton” that will com­plete­ly erase infor­ma­tion from the hard dri­ve with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of recov­ery.

Main characteristics

License type	for per­son­al use
Type of license	stan­dard
Num­ber of users/devices	3
License term	12 months
Lan­guage	Russ­ian
Sup­port­ed OS	Android, Lin­ux, MacOS, Win­dows

Pros and cons

Can be installed even with­out a net­work con­nec­tion, intu­itive inter­face, ensures the safe­ty of chil­dren online, saves part of the data for recov­ery

“Red but­ton” to clean the hard dri­ve

3.Kaspersky Total Security

Pro­tects a per­son­al com­put­er from exter­nal threats and warns of poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous Wi-Fi net­works. The antivirus also hides ban­ner ads and poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous ads from fraud­u­lent web­sites.

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The Total ver­sion has a pass­word man­ag­er for secure access to accounts and secure stor­age of all logins and pass­words. The pro­gram also ana­lyzes the com­plex­i­ty of the pass­word and reports a weak­ness if the user comes up with a vari­ant that is too easy to crack.

The Safe Kids parental con­trol sys­tem restricts chil­dren’s access to inap­pro­pri­ate con­tent, allows the par­ent to set up a list of allowed sites, and track the child’s GPS loca­tion for max­i­mum secu­ri­ty.

How­ev­er, there is a minus: the soft­ware will work sta­bly only on pow­er­ful com­put­ers.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

4 Norton

Antivirus for indi­vid­ual and fam­i­ly use. You don’t have to wor­ry about the safe­ty of your child online — the parental con­trol func­tion is pro­vid­ed. The man­u­fac­tur­er also offers dis­counts for the first year — the min­i­mum cost when buy­ing on the site is 1,299 rubles. (at the same time, the renew­al will cost 2,529 rubles), but there is no free tri­al.

The Iden­ti­ty Safe com­po­nent pro­tects per­son­al infor­ma­tion while work­ing on the net­work and includes an encrypt­ed pass­word store with the abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate and aut­ofill them. The user decides how to scan: reg­u­lar­ly or on demand. Net­work secu­ri­ty is pro­vid­ed by a fire­wall — check­ing the con­tent of e‑mail and eval­u­at­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of down­loaded files.

The Safe Web brows­er add-on allows you to iden­ti­fy safe sites when search­ing and pre­vent phish­ing attempts (theft of per­son­al data, pass­words). For full and unin­ter­rupt­ed oper­a­tion, auto­mat­ic updates of virus data­bas­es and self-pro­tec­tion of the antivirus from third-par­ty inter­fer­ence are pro­vid­ed.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

5. PRO32 Total Security

A com­pre­hen­sive antivirus cre­at­ed by Russ­ian devel­op­ers based on the Indi­an K7 Total Secu­ri­ty. The man­u­fac­tur­er also took care of the safe­ty of the equip­ment: web­cams, USB and Wi-Fi. PRO32 Total Secu­ri­ty pre­vents attacks by virus­es, mal­ware, as well as rootk­its (pro­grams that hide traces of their pres­ence in the sys­tem), boot sec­tor infec­tions and oth­er threats: Inter­net pro­tec­tion, fire­wall and anti-spam are pro­vid­ed for con­sumer con­fi­dence. The user can inde­pen­dent­ly choose a con­ve­nient scan­ning method and set up a pri­va­cy check.

Addi­tion­al pro­tec­tion is pro­vid­ed by parental and device con­trol, secure data dele­tion. You can test the work of the “defend­er” using a ful­ly func­tion­al tri­al ver­sion for 30 days. After that, you will have to pur­chase a license, which, accord­ing to user reviews, often caus­es dif­fi­cul­ties: there are prob­lems with prod­uct selec­tion, tech­ni­cal sup­port, and refunds. The cost of tar­iffs on the offi­cial web­site starts from 990 rubles.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

6. ESET NOD32 Antivirus Platinum Edition

ESET NOD32 Basic Antivirus pro­tects against worms, Tro­jans and ran­somware. Unlike more expen­sive ver­sions, it does not pro­tect Inter­net pay­ments, does not stop sur­veil­lance through a web­cam and key­strokes. Best of all, this ser­vice pack­age is suit­able for a desk­top PC — you won’t have to pay extra for pub­lic Wi-Fi pro­tec­tion, pow­er sav­ing mode and oth­er fea­tures for lap­top own­ers.

This ver­sion is also suit­able for gamers: the pro­gram does not heav­i­ly load the sys­tem, and hides all noti­fi­ca­tions in game mode so that they do not dis­tract the user. The antivirus comes with a man­u­fac­tur­er’s war­ran­ty. The com­pa­ny will refund the cus­tomer for the annu­al license if the virus pass­es through the pro­tec­tion and dam­ages the sys­tem.

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Main characteristics

Pros and cons

7. F‑Secure SAFE

Antivirus from Finnish devel­op­ers for com­pre­hen­sive com­put­er secu­ri­ty in the glob­al net­work, pro­tec­tion against virus­es, tro­jans and ran­somware. Ensures the reli­able oper­a­tion of the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem, surf­ing the Inter­net and online pay­ments. All checks are set up auto­mat­i­cal­ly: you won’t be able to choose the mode your­self. But there is a parental con­trol func­tion — it will help you pro­tect your chil­dren from all sorts of threats and mon­i­tor the time your child spent online.

The man­u­fac­tur­er promis­es a lev­el of improved anti-virus reli­a­bil­i­ty through the addi­tion of web pro­tec­tion, and also offers an easy-to-use spam fil­ter, fire­wall, and anti-spy­ware. You can try all of this for free for 30 days. Fur­ther, the license will cost from 59.99 euros (about 6,000 rubles). If you are con­cerned about the con­di­tion of addi­tion­al devices, such as a web­cam, then this antivirus will not work — there is no pro­tec­tion for exter­nal acces­so­ry pro­grams.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

8. NANO “Antivirus” Pro 1000

NANO “Antivirus” Pro is suit­able for users with any lev­el of com­put­er pro­fi­cien­cy — you can eas­i­ly install and con­fig­ure it “for your­self”. It will take a min­i­mum of actions to ful­ly scan the device, any remov­able media, launch express con­trol and update the anti-virus com­plex. Deep emu­la­tion tech­nolo­gies allow you to con­fi­dent­ly find and treat com­plex encrypt­ed and poly­mor­phic virus­es that are not always reli­ably detect­ed by oth­er solu­tions. True, this antivirus miss­es some new attack options.

For the con­ve­nience of con­sumers, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of indi­vid­ual con­fig­u­ra­tion of the pro­gram is pro­vid­ed: “mir­ror­ing” updates, mul­ti-user mode, pass­word pro­tec­tion of files, work from the com­mand line. You choose the inter­face your­self with­out rein­stalling the antivirus. This option is good for the office, but it will not work for equip­ment with­out the Inter­net — acti­va­tion occurs only over the net­work, parental con­trol is also not pro­vid­ed.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

Call block­ing soft­ware

Get rid of annoy­ing spam calls in one click

9.Kaspersky Internet Security

Has all the advan­tages of the Total ver­sion, except for data back­up and pass­word man­ag­er. This antivirus copes with Tro­jans, worms and hid­den mal­ware, and also pre­vents key­log­gers from rec­og­niz­ing key­strokes, stop­ping even the most obscure ways of steal­ing data.

With Kasper­sky Inter­net Secu­ri­ty, no sus­pi­cious pro­gram will gain access to the web­cam, so the user can be sure of the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of his per­son­al life.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

10. ESET NOD32 Internet Security

100 mil­lion peo­ple have cho­sen ESET NOD32 for its reli­a­bil­i­ty and nice inter­face. These char­ac­ter­is­tics are con­firmed by inde­pen­dent domes­tic and Euro­pean stud­ies.^one. Antivirus always noti­fies you of a poten­tial threat in time, gives use­ful and unob­tru­sive tips for pre­vent­ing and elim­i­nat­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

This ver­sion includes parental con­trols, web­cam and pri­vate Wi-Fi pro­tec­tion, trans­ac­tion data encryp­tion, and Anti-Theft func­tion­al­i­ty. The lat­ter helps to find the stolen device and sig­nif­i­cant­ly increas­es the chance of catch­ing an intrud­er.

Antivirus saves bat­tery pow­er when the device is not con­nect­ed to pow­er. This is true for a lap­top if you need to use it often on the road or car­ry it to school.

The user is also pro­vid­ed with a guar­an­tee: if a dan­ger­ous pro­gram pass­es through antivirus pro­tec­tion and harms the sys­tem, the own­er of the device will receive a refund in the amount of an annu­al license.

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Main characteristics

Pros and cons

Leaders of the Past

1. McAfee LiveSafe

Many peo­ple are famil­iar with the free ver­sion of this antivirus, which appeared on the com­put­er when installing oth­er pro­grams and was removed with great dif­fi­cul­ty. But the licensed McAfee LiveSafe is unob­tru­sive, prac­ti­cal, and high­ly secure. This is a reli­able pro­gram that helps you surf the Inter­net, down­load files with­out risk and opti­mize sys­tem resources to speed up appli­ca­tions.

Antivirus almost nev­er false pos­i­tives and restricts access only to dan­ger­ous sites. If the user needs to com­plete­ly delete a secret file with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of recov­ery, he can use the Shred­der func­tion. The Quick­Clean option will clean up all resid­ual, use­less and tem­po­rary files to free up disk space and improve sys­tem per­for­mance.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

2. Bitdefender Internet Security

Over the past three years, the pro­gram has received numer­ous awards from inde­pen­dent research lab­o­ra­to­ries. Accord­ing to Roskach­est­vo², Bit­de­fend­er Inter­net Secu­ri­ty is the most reli­able antivirus that is more suc­cess­ful than oth­ers in detect­ing and elim­i­nat­ing threats. This pro­gram is effec­tive for scan­ning, repelling hack­er attacks and real-time pro­tec­tion.

Bit­de­fend­er Inter­net Secu­ri­ty has a stan­dard set of func­tions: web­cam pro­tec­tion, trans­ac­tions, net­work traf­fic con­trol, spam fil­ter­ing and data dele­tion. To pro­tect chil­dren from inap­pro­pri­ate con­tent, you can acti­vate parental con­trols.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the man­u­fac­tur­er has not added an opti­miza­tion and accel­er­a­tion fea­ture to the Inter­net Secu­ri­ty ser­vice pack­age. To get them, the user needs to buy a ver­sion of Total Secu­ri­ty.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

3.AVAST Premium Security

In recent years, devel­op­ers have fixed all soft­ware bugs, allowed to hide noti­fi­ca­tions and removed annoy­ing ads: Now the antivirus is easy to use and elim­i­nates all types of dig­i­tal threats, so paid and free ver­sions of Avast get into the tops of inde­pen­dent research rat­ings. The effi­cien­cy of scan­ning and check­ing in real time in this ver­sion is close to 100%.

Antivirus pro­tects the most vul­ner­a­ble parts of the sys­tem from dan­ger­ous pro­grams and blocks access to fake sites. It also pre­vents poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous pro­grams from mod­i­fy­ing files on the own­er’s com­put­er, so attack­ers can­not remove or block access to sen­si­tive data.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

4. AVG Internet Security

One of the best antivirus­es in terms of secu­ri­ty and threat detec­tion. Detects and blocks scam emails and spam that may con­tain links to fake phish­ing sites. The pro­gram also encrypts all pay­ment data and pro­tects the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of bank­ing trans­ac­tions.

Repeat­ed sys­tem scans are faster because the antivirus remem­bers and skips safe files if they have not changed since the last scan. AVG Inter­net Secu­ri­ty is reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed with infor­ma­tion about new virus­es, bug fix­es and improve­ments to cer­tain fea­tures.

The dis­ad­van­tages of the pro­gram are not the most con­ve­nient inter­face and false pos­i­tives. Some­times the antivirus does not allow access to safe sites and finds non-exis­tent threats.

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Main characteristics

Pros and cons

Inex­pen­sive lap­tops

Man­u­fac­tur­ers are invent­ing new ways to mar­ket, includ­ing low­er­ing prices

5. Panda Dome Premium

Antivirus with wide func­tion­al­i­ty and low load on the com­put­er. Part of the oper­a­tions takes place in the cloud, which reduces the con­sump­tion of sys­tem resources. All virus sig­na­tures are also stored in the cloud ser­vice, so there is no need to man­u­al­ly update the data­bas­es.

The Pre­mi­um ver­sion has access to unlim­it­ed VPN. This fea­ture hides the real IP address, encrypts incom­ing and out­go­ing data, and enhances the user’s online pri­va­cy. A VPN allows you to secure­ly share doc­u­ments while work­ing remote­ly and surf the Inter­net safe­ly using pub­lic Wi-Fi.

In terms of pro­tec­tion, Pan­da lags behind top antivirus­es and can­not pro­vide 99.9% elim­i­na­tion of threats. How­ev­er, addi­tion­al fea­tures and speed can be the main argu­ments in favor of this prod­uct.

Main characteristics

Pros and cons

How to choose an antivirus for Windows

The choice large­ly depends on the per­son­al pref­er­ences of the per­son, because pop­u­lar antivirus­es have a sim­i­lar set of func­tions and lev­el of pro­tec­tion. There­fore, the first thing to pay atten­tion to is con­ve­nience. If it is unpleas­ant to work with the pro­gram, the user is unlike­ly to use all its fea­tures and be sat­is­fied with the pur­chase. To super­fi­cial­ly eval­u­ate the pro­gram, just install the free ver­sion or see screen­shots of the inter­face. Per­haps already at this stage it will become clear whether the antivirus is suit­able or not.

Next, pay atten­tion to pro­tec­tion qual­i­ty. This is an objec­tive para­me­ter that is reg­u­lar­ly mon­i­tored by dozens of inde­pen­dent research lab­o­ra­to­ries. They put antivirus­es in the con­di­tions of real dai­ly use of a PC for sev­er­al months and then fix the results. You can find the data of such tests to make a choice.

It is also impor­tant to choose a pro­gram with the right fea­ture set. And here it is worth not­ing that com­pa­nies usu­al­ly offer sev­er­al paid ser­vice pack­ages at once. In this case, a com­par­i­son table is always added to the site with the capa­bil­i­ties of each ver­sion and a brief expla­na­tion of why they are need­ed. Based on this, you can choose the appro­pri­ate antivirus.

Anoth­er cri­te­ri­on is sys­tem load. The own­er of a weak PC should focus on unpre­ten­tious and light pro­grams, oth­er­wise the antivirus will slow down the entire sys­tem. Antivirus­es with the cloud depend least of all on com­put­er resources, because some of the process­es take place on remote servers.

If there is more than one com­put­er in the fam­i­ly, one license can be pur­chased for sev­er­al devices. It also helps to take care of the dig­i­tal safe­ty of chil­dren. Fam­i­ly devices are linked to the same account, and the par­ent can make a list of accept­able sites for the child.

Popular questions and answers

The most fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions of our read­ers are answered by experts: Alexan­der Schukin, tech­ni­cal direc­tor of host­ing provider Tendence.ru, and Pavel Shul­ga, CIO of T1 Group.

Sources

1. https://www.esetnod32.ru/company/press/center/eset-nod32-dokazal-nadezhnost-i-bystrodeystvie/
2. https://rskrf.ru/ratings/technologii/programmnoe-obesspechenie/antivirusy/

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