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Top 10 Most Downloaded Security Apps [Movers & Shakers]

It’s time once again for our featured Movers and Shakers post. Each week, we take one software category and list the top ten most downloaded apps. This week, we are looking at security applications. These are the apps that can be carried on a USB thumb drive and can be used on pretty much any computer.

  1. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
    2. Weighing in at first place, raking in 2,583,548 downloads this week is AVG’s free anti-virus application. A great free anti virus program that we have seen many times on MakeUseOf.com including our Top 15 Must-Have Windows Applications. It has had 268,048,933 total downloads! It was also our readers choice in our poll here.
  2. Avast Free Antivirus
    3. This comes in second place with over 1 million downloads this week and over 79 million downloads since its release. Avast is a great AV solution and one I use personally. Avast came in second place to AVG in our poll.
  3. Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus
    4. Another anti-virus application that I have used personally on some slower machines.
  4. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
    5. This one is my go-to application for spyware and virus removal when nothing else can do the trick. I always keep MalwareBytes on my flash drive – don’t you? It was covered on MakeUseOf here.
  5. Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware
    6. I used to use Ad-Aware back in the day for spyware removal before my antivirus application knew what that was. Apparently it has come a long way since 2004. With over 350 million downloads, the users can’t be wrong!
  6. IObit Security 360
    7. An application I have never personally used but it did make it into our 15 Must-Have PC Applications.
  7. Spybot – Search & Destroy
    8. Good old Spybot S&D. I couldn’t have made it out of 2005 without you! Not quite as popular as Ad-Aware but another Must-Have application.
  8. ZoneAlarm
    9. The best free firewall application on the market. Protect yourself from unauthorized access by applications or people. ZoneAlarm came in 3rd place in our What Firewall Do You Use poll.
  9. Hotspot Shield
    10. This is a tool to help maintain your anonymity on unknown or unsafe wireless networks. It encrypts your web traffic by using their service. It is ad-supported meaning you will see their ads on top of every web page and there is also a 5GB limit per month. I have not personally used this but with almost 3 million downloads since last year maybe they are on to something. In the past we recommended the app as a tool to watch Hulu movies from abroad but I think it no longer works for that.
  10. A Squared Free
    11. This is a utility for scanning for and removing malware from your computer. You can run four types of scans. They are Quick, Smart, Custom and Deep scans. The deep scan took over 6 hours to run on my machine and it is pretty reliable in detection. It seems it is pretty slow when updating the application and sometimes even requires a restart. It is able to quarantine items and then allow you to rescan them against a new definition file. With over 2 million downloads in about a month, it seems to be growing in popularity exponentially.
Check out this post on 7 Essential Security Downloads That You Must Have Installed and this post on The 10 Best Firefox Security and Privacy Add-ons.
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