Heh… I am ranked #1. As in, my name. Or rather, Facebook. What to do, when the whole world, there's only 1 unique me.
That also means that it is very easy to find me if I ever got lost in some yaya world out there. And that also means that when people know my full name, I have no privacy…
But who dares to claim 'privacy' when he/she is connected to the world wide web? Your IP address is unique, and your identity is known to 'privileged' people. I have to put the quotes, because besides the ISPs, hackers, bug users, virus spreaders, are all very interested to know you, only that they need to know you more on the financial side: banking, ecommerce, etc.
Nowadays, everyone (I hope) should have one form of anti-virus software or another. Some have more 'powerful' firewall, and some with lots of ram to spare, install malware scanners. Note the 's'. Lol.
Currently, I am using AVG Anti-virus Free Edition. It features daily updates. As long as you are connected to the web, when you start up the computer for the day, it will attempt to download the latest updates and install them automatically. It is good enough of me I guess, with periodic red window alerts here and there when I hopped into websites trying to install or run strange codes or programs on my computer.
Previously, my laptop came with Trend Micro Office Scan preinstalled by the school. I had a 'fun' time trying to update the virus signatures, and even more 'fun' time trying to uninstall it (password protected, and not by me). In the end? Reinstall everything, just to get rid of it. Virus don't understand the word 'scare-crow'. Without the latest signatures, it's of not much use, except for proventing you from doing some stupid (and perhaps highly dangerous) things to your computer.
So, how do you know that your anti-virus is actually doing something, and not just sitting there and waiting for something to happen?
Try the anti-virus test file from EICAR! You can read more about it from that link. That link actually contains some test files for your testing purposes. EICAR test files are widely recognised. Theoretically, the files pose no harm to your computer, except maybe by taking up 68 bytes of your hard disk space for storage.
I did a test, long ago, and again now, to see if my anti-virus program is awake or sleeping. It's wide awake!
You should be able to see some anti-virus program warning about that file being a virus when you try to download one of the files (maybe, not the text one). If you see that, congratulations. If not, maybe you should start investing on a working anti-virus.
Happy testing!