How to Avoid Malware and Spyware

Avoiding malware and spyware online is getting harder, it's becoming more and more common and a lot of the time people get infected without even knowing.
The problem is most people are not very clued up when it comes to internet security, some people will browse the web on an old web browser (Internet explorer 6 for example) and no anti virus, this alone is a very dangerous combination as IE6 is vulnerable to all kinds of exploits and without any anti virus protection you could be a victim to a 'drive-by' web exploit.
Drive-By exploits - A drive-by exploit is when a malicious website is setup that attempts to automatically install malware or spyware once a user visits it. Users are often lured to the site through malicious links in emails or various other advertising techniques whereby a user thinks the page contains something of real value. These exploits are normally '0-day' which means that have been recently discovered by hackers and most the time will not have any kind of fix for them, because of this the success rate for infection is normally quite high. With a drive-by exploit unless your Anti virus manages to stop it you will have no idea what has happened and malware will be silently installed onto your machine.
With this is mind then its important to always use an up to date browser (personally I recommend Firefox) and an up to date anti virus. It also won't hurt to use a malware scanning tool such as Malware Bytes Antimalware to do a weekly scan of your system to make sure you're not infected.
Remember that no anti virus / anti malware software will ever offer 100% protection, new threats are constantly being created and it can take time for anti virus vendors to find these and add them to their detection lists. This is why it is important to exercise caution whilst online; never visit any suspicious links and always be careful with what your downloading!