Antivirus updates: It's good to be confident, but it's best to be certain

Avira GmbH is a leading global provider of IT security solutions for professional and private use. It boasts over twenty years of experience and being one of the pioneers in this field. The IT security solutions firm posted a survey question on its website in December, 2009 in which 18,000 surfers shared insights into how they personally manage updates to their antivirus software. From the survey results it was found out that majority of surfers or respondents rely on their virus protection application’s automatic update and don’t bother to do.

According to the survey results available and released on 21st April 2010, on their website www.avira.com, 37 percent (6,448) of respondents rely entirely on their virus protection program’s automatic update feature. This group of respondents is happy with automatic update configuration so that they will not check again. 17 percent (3,007) indicated that they trust that updates will take place automatically, but to be on the safe side, they also make regular checks to ensure that virus definitions really are up-to-date. A further 20 percent (3,604) rely totally on their virus protection program without ever checking it, and claim that they never worry whether their virus definitions are up-to-date.

The statement further discloses that the biggest surprise for us from the survey results was that a quarter of respondents (4,384) prefer to take matters into their own hands and always perform manual virus definition updates while the remaining 1.4 percent (245) of respondents indicated that they don’t update their antivirus software at all, but that they leave this to a friend or acquaintance "who knows more about PCs".

For optimum protection, Avira recommends that all users should choose a security solution that can be relied on to protect against viruses, while also able to filter infected websites and prevent programs from gaining unauthorized access to the computer. However, the most important thing about reliable virus protection is that updates should take place as often as possible. That’s why Avira recommends enabling the automatic update, while die-hard manual updaters should run the update function several times daily.

Source: www.avira.com