Protect your PC beyond anti-virus

For most people, Windows Defender is good enough for the purpose of stopping virus. Is anti virus enough to protect your computer and information on it since that is the ultimate goal? the answer is NO.

Standard anti-virus like Windows defender or others for consumers is capable of stopped a small friction of the threads your computer is facing every minutes you connect it to the Internet. Malware like ransom virus through phishing and public WiFi at McDonald's or Starbucks, or the fake public WiFi that was setup for the purpose of injecting Malware into your computer, has become more common than virus attached the the email.

The best protection is to have all the security tools that help but not solely depends on those tools knowing all of them has limitations. A few best practices for everyone

1. Never click on unknown link on the soliciting email, always use bookmark to go to your banks or sites you do business with to get to the site.
2. Encrypt information on your computers, not the whole disk encryption but file level encryption, so when you lost them, you can just shrug off. Try to find encryption software that supports long password. Normal password is easy to crack which defeats the purpose of encryption
3. Back up. You need at least 2 copies of back up, one on cloud and one on external drives. Remember to encrypt the back up too. In the worst scenario, recover the OS and restore from back up.

Or you can use APF Cyber Privacy to take care of the encryption part.