Downloads Made Safe With Scans

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You’ve probably heard it from everyone you know: “Don’t download files from people you don’t know.” This advice is now our golden rule of computer security safety. But truth be told, we all have to download something from an unknown source at one point or another. If we don’t, we won’t be able to watch videos, calculate data, or communicate with loved ones overseas.

Downloading stuff from the Internet is what people do, and there’s just no stopping it no matter where the downloads comes from! Chances are that you’ve downloaded a program or two from an unknown source, and suffered no consequences as well. Many of us in fact have done the same with no problems. We don’t know the folks at AOL for instance – but we’ve downloaded some of their software programs.

We don’t know Microsoft’s crew either – but we’ve downloaded their patches. We’ve even downloaded files from the websites of unknown software programmers without qualm. The catchall issue, of course, is determining which resources are safe to download from. It isn’t always easy to distinguish a safe download from a harmful one just from looking at a website. That’s why we scan our downloads with anti-virus, anti-adware, and anti-spyware programs.

These programs will scan the contents of a zipped file or executable archive before we open it or install it onto our systems. If these programs detect anything suspicious, we hit the delete button faster than we can say, “Buh-bye buddy – Not my computer!”