the difference between anti-spy,anti-malware and anti-virus?

[el bravo]

Will somebody tell me the difference of anti spy,anti malware and anti virus? is it okay to have 2 anti virus or anti something?! is it necessary to have all of them in my desktop? wont it contradict with each other? please excuse my ignorance..thanks!

[Unluckylunchroom987]

Anti-spy is actually tracking cookies and track where you go online to get your history to place ads that pertain to you, YA, Facebook, Yahoo mail, Gmail everybody uses them. Look on the right, that ad on there is probably putting in ads that are either in your area or pertain to what you do online.

Male ware is just Malicious Software, basically the same as a virus.

Anti-virus is just that a program to stop a virus and/or maleware.

Most General all around anti-virus programs have them all incorporated including anti-spam, (email).

If you do not have a good anti-virus, get one, they have free ones available.

[Ruan942]

anti spy is aimed at spyware
anti malware is aimed at malware meaning everything that tries to do harm to your PC
anti virus can be all of them at once, but is mainly aimed at viruses.

Antivirus has background scanning, but some anti malware and anti spy has it too.

As long as there is only 1 anti malware application doing background scanning, it is ok to have more than 1.

[Tony RB]

You are not ignorant on purpose, you just haven't learned all the terminogy yet.

Wikipedia has an article on Malware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

Follow the "see also" links at the bottom of that page; you could spend an hour or two just reading all those articles.

People argue over the difference in the terms, but it doesn't really matter to most people. Malware is software that interferes with your use of the computer. Anti-malware is software that tries - and tries and tries - to prevent malware from getting installed on your computer, and if some is already on your computer, tries to remove it.

TonyRB
Saturday, December 12, 2009