Common question, what’s the difference between malware and viruses? What’s the difference between anti-virus and anti-malware? Malware is a broad term that comes from the derivative -mal meaning bad, -ware software, bad software versus virus. Virus is designed to replicate itself. When it gets on your computer it duplicates itself in a way, traditional virus does in the body, and replicates itself to other computers. Hence, spreading itself. Malware kind of does the same thing but it’s designed to get on a computer and it pretty much is like the standard stuff that you see that pops up ads. It tries to get you to buy stuff. Where a virus kind of does a little deeper stuff then that. Where they’re trying to get your credit card number and do a little more nasty stuff. You’ll hear malware be interchanged with adware a lot. It’s just a more broad term.
Now anti-malware, there’s actually specific software designed to take out malware. Malwarebytes is probably the leader right now. They have a free version. It works just as well as the pro version except you can only use it one time. It doesn’t run in the background like the pro version. We use that in our work everyday. Almost all techs do. If you think you might have malware on your computer, go download the free version of Malwarebytes and run it. Also you can run, and you should run, in tandem, an anti-virus in the background. Go get Webroot, it’s $40 and run it for a year. It’s great. It’s great software. But also keep Malwarebytes on your computer and run it for free once a month. That’s just kind of a summary.