Virus Protection

Many of the more common viruses morph or change frequently to make them more difficult to detect. Viruses spread rapidly and by many different ways (for example, via email attachments; infected document files; Web sites that contain hostile code that can infect your computer through vulnerable browsers; and unprotected fileshares). Your computer may be vulnerable to virus attacks if you are not using antivirus software and updating it regularly. Using an antivirus product and configuring it to update virus definitions automatically will help keep your computer protected. 

Antivirus Programs

Antivirus programs provide some level of protection against malware that has successfully invaded your system, but they work by examining the structure and content of the files that reside there. If a file looks like something that is known to be bad, antivirus software can quarantine or remove it before it loads into your computer's main memory and begins to execute. The problem is that many of the newer attacks on your computer are designed to look benign to both an antivirus program and a firewall, and they don't appear suspicious until they start to run. Most of them then execute silently in the background, so you're not even aware that anything is happening until the damage is done. It's even possible that you won't discover it at all.

Antivirus Software

RIT provides virus protection software recommendations for students, faculty, and staff personal devices:

Please Note: If you previously installed a McAfee Anti-Virus product from this page. Please uninstall it and look at one of our alternatives provided below for Anti-Virus protection. 

Windows

For users running Windows 10 operating systems, we recommend using the built-in Windows Defender software for virus protection.

For users running Windows versions older than 10, we recommend upgrading to Windows 10. Old versions no longer gets security updates.