Five precautions for avoiding malware when you download and install software

Downloading a little-known program can be scary. Take these steps to protect yourself.Downloading software from a confusion publisher that does not have positive reputation can be risky. It’s like you are allowing a stranger to enter into your home.

But if you follow the below steps, you will be on safer side:

1. Do your own research

Fond out the type of software that you are searching for and software that you are looking to install on your PC. Find the software by using search engine and see what people are saying about it. Check out on the popular download sites like Softpedia, FileHippo and Major Geeks.

2. Download from the publisher's site

Well, you can check the download sites, but you can visit the publisher’s own site because they will be having the current version of the software as well it will be clean from the malware and viruses.

However, if the publisher own sites redirect you to some another download site, you can securely presume that it has the preferred version.

3. Scan before installing

Your anti-virus will immediately scan the software that you install on your computer, but to be on safer side you can manually scan the software once again with your anti-virus program.

4. Consider that you may have a false positive

Anti-virus program detect the virus and it may not be able to detect malware and therefore you can’t really depend on your anti-virus program. In such cases you can use the other on demand scanners such as Anti-malware scanner to get a better result.

Another tips – While downloading software if any of the above programs detect malware, it inform you what they have detected. if you want to learn more about the malware then you can sue search engine like Google or Bing. You may find lots of negative reviews.

5. Watch out for PUPs

Even if your anti-virus alert you that the installation includes potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), you can securely install it, but you have to be very watchful. In fact you must always keep eyes open to watch out PUPs when installing any software.

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