The best antivirus is common sense. Use trusted sources, read comments, take regular backups, and use a dedicated server instead of your everyday driver. You can rely on Windows Defender or run another OS like Linux or even MacOS.
If you must download a suspicious file, check out sandbox options like Windows Sandbox.
If “Protection” is not the highest score, its shit. The other two (perf/use) are not so important generally, but I would say a score of 6,6,6 is far superior to anything 5.5,X,Y. Probably also means the company isn’t a rolling rock gathering moss. (“We make AV, and we keep it up to date” as opposed to “we are a megacorp, and profits overrule everything else”).
If I download a file from a questionable source: scan it (with clamscan) If I run an executable I don’t trust: use a locked-down (with firejail)
No matter the antivirus, if you keep downloading and running questionable files, you run the risk of viruses. I would say that browsing patterns are more important than any antivirus.
Defender all the way. Not a single virus since Windows 7. The thing some people don’t realize is that in order for third party AV to work it has to modify the lowest layers of the OS which actually exposes it more to attacks. You have to trust the AV to do its job perfectly or you’re screwed.
My source? Just crap I heard online before. Probably bunk. But I stand by my personal anecdote.
Third party AV just becomes malware itself by hooking into nearly every function at the kernel level. Of course this adds overhead and why historically Windows updates and third party AV have clashed leading to disaster. Blue screens, failed updates or failure to boot.
I still end up using programs/services such as malwarebytes and virustotal on my desktop since defender isn’t perfect. I have had a few instances where a game that I download outside of places like Steam had files that are actually clean and safe given false positives. Same with any key gens I’ve used.
With malwarebytes and virustotal, I’ve had less false positives in legally obtained games I know are clean. Moreso with malwarebytes since there’s seemingly almost always one engine on VT saying the file is bad regardless of what it is.
I always find that having a 3rd party check a file is better than just having defender do all the work. What one engine might claim is bad might be safe to another.
I trust that windows viruses won’t work on Linux. Plus I don’t pirate software, unless I can crack it myself using binaries provided by the software. I just see pirating software as supporting a company I hate instead of supporting an open source project I like
Yep, as always, spinning up a vm of Linux is just so easy and plenty of ways to recover from a bad moment with snapshots and zfs, or easily restart from a fresh premade image. Also, since you can run the vpn on the host, you can make the vpn connection not have to be limited by the vm performance/limited resources and you don’t need to worry of there being a leak of information to the internet about your system or any identifiable info.
I just see pirating software as supporting a company I hate instead of supporting an open source project I like
Yes!
Adobe owes a huge part of their success to piracy. It made it impossible for smaller companies to get a foothold back in the 90s because everyone just pirated Photoshop. It never would have become so entrenched (or grown so exploitative in licensing) if people had instead used cheaper/free alternatives.
I remember seeing a comparison between defenders and windows defender was on top. I see no reason to pay because of this. Either way I clean boot my pc every 4 months to keep it running very smooth.
I don’t trust Windows Defender at all. I use BitchDefender all of the time. I tried Windows Defender for a year and it didn’t fill me with confidence.
I also upload to virus total anything from an unknown source. I tried to use Intezer as well but I had many problems with my account that I have up on them. For some reason their server didn’t like my account. A brand new account got closed the following day for being inactive for too long. A week later I can reset the password but I can’t log in.
Lol, you’re not wrong. There will always be idiots trying to gaslight here, though.
It’s not evil to eat meat - - erm, I mean… Use windows! I don’t even fucking like windows, but like… Yeah, I like to game and that’s the easiest platform to game on.
Exactly this. I’m getting plenty of downvotes and people claiming I’m talking crap but when I tried the Linux gaming life, I couldn’t even get Minecraft to work. Freaking Minecraft. And it only continued downhill from there. I make no claim that it’s not possible to game on Linux, only that it’s often such a chore that your entire planned gaming session can end up being a session of reading through forums filled with snide comments from pretentious Linux fanboys instead. I started as a console gamer and the fear of PC gaming was always that PC gaming can be a nightmarish tinker fest but Windows is much more click-and-play than Linux in my-and-most-people’s experience.
So you’re gonna pretend you didnt reply to my other comment where I mentioned that Linux has steam and supports 98% of AAA titles so you can play the victim now?
Being too ignorant to figure out how to set up Minecraft and giving up after 2 minutes doesn’t back up ypur shit talking about Linux.
I’m not playing victim. You were needlessly rude. And for your information, I wasn’t ignorant, I didn’t spend “two minutes” trying to figure it out. I reached out to Mojang support who told me they don’t have a support department and couldn’t help. The few suggestions on I found on forums at the time didn’t work. So frankly, you’re sounding exactly like one of the usual pretentious asshats on the Linux forums who refuses to face the fact that an OS shouldn’t be so overly complicated that it requires any more than a couple of clixks to run the best selling game of all time. No amount of defensive fanboying from you is going to change that.
My philosphy is that if the game doesn’t run on Linux, it isn’t worth playing, because most games do work, and the ones that don’t, are usually because the Anti-Virus the game uses. Which in EAC case, to enable playing on linux is just a button click (iirc).
It’s essentially an obligation or responsibility at this point. I don’t actually use arch though. I use a ublue based something image immutable whatever doodad Thinkpad with mods blah cocaine coreboot.
Anyways sail the seas on the penguin, don’t worry about viruses. Within reason though as some configurations can allow windows software to fuck you up.
I don’t (generally) sail the high seas, but I’m surprised that people don’t use SysInternals tooling on windows. Of note:
ProcExp - A way better process explorer and has a built-in VirusTotal scanner for all running processes. 100 times better than standard process explorer. This in combination with windows defender is nearly always enough.
AutoRuns - A tool to see what automatically runs on your system. Included image hijacks and such. This is for handling potential post-infection scenarios.
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