Did you know that about 17% of PC’s have no virus protection in 2012 according to McAfee & in November 2014 about 10% of Windows 8 computers were running expired virus protection?
Aside from these numbers, let’s assume you know for a fact you have a valid working anti-virus installed on your computer, it’s up to date with the latest virus definitions and the lasts version of the product. It’s even set to do regular scans which you know for a fact are working because you can see when it’s running. Did you know it is not doing a full deep scan?
Regardless if you are allowing scheduled scans to run or hitting “Full scan” manually in your anti-virus product of choice, it is most likely not doing a full deep scan. One of the reasons for this in my opinion is because it takes longer to run, requires more resources and so it slows down your computer. It would become frustrating and people cancel the scans. You don’t want to leave your computer on all night to do a scan but you can’t have it run during the day either slowing you down. So the default scans are less intensive.
The following settings are examples of what may not set by default:
1. All file types (Rather than only infectable type files)
2. Thorough scanning
3. Scanning for cookies
4. Scanning inside archives
Some programs may let you have two schedules so you can have short simple scans run daily and full deep scans run once per week outside of your busy times. If you can only have one schedule, you can set it to do full scans but only once per week during none busy times and even have it shut down the computer when done. Alternatively you can have daily regular scans as the schedule but then do a full deep scan manually once per week or whenever you feel it’s necessary, especially after some suspicious activity.
Below are links to resources, but don’t just assume virus scans are the end all. You need to ensure Windows updates are always current as well as all programs. Same goes for Apple Mac computers, they have updates for a reason and they do get viruses, you just may not know it because most Mac users don’t install virus protection until after it’s too late.
Here’s some resources for you:
Some statistics
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/danger-stale-av-software,news-19928.html
How to run a deep scan with AVG
https://forums.avg.com/ww-en/avg-forums?sec=thread&act=show&id=85133
How to run a deep scan with Norton
https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/kb20080417125651EN_EndUserProfile_en_us
McAfee doesn’t seem to have instructions besides in the community chat
https://community.mcafee.com/thread/19279?start=0&tstart=0
How to adjust scan settings for Avast
https://www.avast.com/en-id/faq.php?article=AVKB178