First of all: 3 AVs on your computer
. Basic rule number 1: One is more than enough, because they can conflict with each other and cause problems. For a good antivirus, I personnaly would recommend ESET, Bitdefender, Kaspersky or Norton. If you want a free AV, then Avast or Comodo are the best choices. Also note that when you use a so called 'cloud av' such as the free version of Panda, it can be the case that you are not fully protected or you can not acces the full database when you perform a scan when you are not connected to the internet. The positive thing about them is that every second, you get immediately the newest definitions in real-time. Most of the today's security products have both the offline database and the cloud though.
When you buy an internet security suite, then you have AV(antivirus) and Firewall both in one package. If you go for the free ones, then I recommend installing a free firewall such as Comodo firewall or Private firewall.
If you don't do dangerous things and you know what you do on your pc, you don't need a sandbox. This piece of software runs programs in an isolated area and so they don't make any changes on your system. If you try programs that are maybe risky, you can use a sandbox, like Sandboxie. Sometimes there is already a sandbox built in your security suite, for example, when you use Comodo or the paid version of Avast.
Apart from this basic layer of protection, you can always scan your pc with so called on-demand or second opion scanners, such as Malwarebytes (free version is already enough) and Emsisoft Emergency kit, which you both mentioned in your post. Other good ones are Herdprotect (which uses about every antivirus database there is in the world) or Hitman Pro (only free for one scan, after that you have to pay for it). Use these programs, when you want to be sure that there is no malware on your computer, but off course you don't have to do that everyday
. When you have just one file that you want to scan with lots of engines, you can also upload it to a site called
Virustotal to scan it. You can also use that site to scan links.
Next one you mentioned was HIPS. It stands for Host Intrusion Prevention System. Basically it is commonly part of a firewall and it prevents unauthorized sources to make changes on your system. For example, when a program tries to modify something that is important on your system (startup related things or strange registry changes for example) it will alert you when the action is suspicious. You can find more about it
here.
When we mention an adblocker here, we mean indeed the browser extension. Recently there were alerts that ads can even be suspicious and infect your system (malvertising). Also on some download sites, it can be sometimes a bit difficult to find the right download button (on Cnet for example), and to prevent you from dowloading what is called 'adware' by clicking on, for example, some 'download now' Ads, I would definitely recommend using an Adblocker.
There are lots of different Adblockers these days. Adblock plus is probably the most well known one, but there are some people who can't stand that they whitelist some websites who pay to not block their ads. Other ones are µblock, ghostery etc, but I prefer Adguard.
The extensions can be installed on the popular browsers, such as Google Chrome and Firefox (Microsoft Edge has no extension support, but they are working on it), but you can also check other ones, who are maybe for a newbie not that well known, such as Opera, Maxthon, Palemoon or Vivaldi, which also have these extensions available. Don't be afraid to check them out, they are safe
.
To help you further, please post your security config in
the config share section on the forum here, so that other experts can give you feedback of your security config and give you some more tips based on what you have on your computer. You told here a bit in a 'vague' way what kind of security software you exactly have on your system right now, so if you share it by creating a new threat there, we can help you based on your current config.
To sum up: you need a good av with a firewall (built in the suite or a separate product), a good adblocker if you prefer an ad-free internet (and as I already said an extra layer of protection keeping you away from at first sight 'attractive' software but is in fact just 'adware' or other useless crap), keep your software up-to-date (very important, so that bugs and security patches can be solved and applied on your system), use a second opinion scanner when you think there might be something suspicious on your system BUT the most important one is what we call the 'Common Sense security suite': Be careful on the web, don't install software you are not sure about (or use a sandbox when you have to), don't click on everything you see, just visit and click only on sites you trust.
With this 'survival guide' you should have enough 'armor' to stay safe and to get a malware free life!
To learn more, stay active here in te forums. This is the right place to do so!
