What the title says, and that’s pretty much it. Do you or don’t you?
I’ve been solely trusting windows defender for years now. Honestly, the main way I prevent myself from getting compromised is by sticking to trusted sources whenever possible. If the torrent is provided by someone who’s only ever uploaded one thing, there’s no way in hell I’m trusting it. Beyond that, it’s a balancing act.
People (rightly) shit on Windows but Defender, despite constantly flagging my windows activator as malware, is the best antivirus that’s ever happened. If that fails (occasionally I have a family member who needs help) the amazing Malwarebytes takes care of it with one scan.
If that fails, whatever—reformat. Reformat never fails hahaha.
I haven’t got a virus once in my life, and I’m old. But like you, I stick to trusted sources. Even back on Kazaa, I made sure I’m not running an exe or bat and I was totally fine. The worst thing that happened to me was fucking with the mean clock in AOHELL TOOLZ too much and it put like a thousand text files title FUCK YOU in windows folder, circa windows XP. Luckily deleted them before my dad found out. Took FOREVER with a 400MHz Celeron.
At least it didn’t infect me with CIH, like it threatened (it told me the previous clock did that if you clicked it too much.)
Just FYI, these days even a format can fail. Some things manage to get into your actual bios, or infect your drive firmware.
Extremely rare, but still very much possible.
Possible, but nobody is wasting such a good exploit on average consumer PC’s.
I upload any suspicious files to virustotal.com.
I set my VPN to Russia. Russian viruses are known to not infect their homeland, by design. They promised they wouldn’t, so you know it’s good. I then run the program, and sometimes my CPU starts heating up and slowing down my computer a bit. It happens anytime I turn on my computer now that I think about it. Computer is always running slow. I guess that’s the CPU checking if the viruses are Russian and then rejecting their requests. I can verify this because when I open Task Manager, I don’t see anything showing high CPU usage. It’s probably my imagination since the thing is doing what it’s supposed to be doing and stopping the viruses.
Only downside is I occasionally get a random command prompt pop up that disappears immediately before I can read it. Plus, my identity has been stolen several times and I’ve had to get ahold of Macrosoft Support (they built Windows so I trust them) and buy their premium $500 virus total scam defender package that I pay for monthly, but I don’t think those are related.
This is the way.
AKA don’t be this guy.
Don’t trust executables on your computer. A Windows VM in a Linux host that you revert to a prior snapshot of you’re really curious.
I don’t (generally) sail the high seas, but I’m surprised that people don’t use SysInternals tooling on windows. Of note:
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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.
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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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I don’t even have antivirus on my computer. I almost exclusively use private trackers and download music/shows/movies.
I sandbox stuff, using firejail or VM’s. coming from a cybersecurity perspective, AV’s are ok but they also aren’t stoping 0-days or malware that has been coded well by a good hacker.
Not using Windows kinda solves this problem. It also solves many other problems lol
Including the problem of having too many games to choose from 😉
I have about 900 games not counting emulation.
1996 wants its hot take back
And that’s 2023 on the phone, it would like its uncomfortable facts shown.
You need to change your username; you’re not debatable, you can’t even write a coherent sentence.
Linux has steam and supports 98% of AAA game titles.
Nobody cares
You care enough to write ignorant comments about it.
Lol you do
I’ll take “COMEBACKS THAT AREN’T ACTUALLY CLEVER” for $800, Alex!
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.
I use Windows defender, MBAM, and Rkill.
Haven’t had any issues yet, but I also choose my moorings well.
Q: How do you know that you don’t have a virus without AV?
A: How do you know that you don’t have a virus WITH AV?
Defender is sufficient when using common sense and being rightfully suspicious.
My toolbox also contains virustotal for suspicious executables/files.If you actually want good protection, you’d need tiowatch at a solution that has behavior real time analysis. But that would also interfere with a lot of programs if they employ weird/shady programming (like trainers, mod menus etc.)
…do you still trust Windows…
lol, not since 2004, and I’ve never looked back!
Format c:/
I sail naked AF.
Balls to the wind my friend o7
Pretty sure Windows Defender is fine now and not markedly worse than something like Bitdefender. I gave up on Bitdefender when they ended the free version with no advance warning
Windows Defender is fine. The only anti-virus good enough at what it does to be worth buying instead of just using WD is Emisisoft, and that has its own set of issues.
Windows Defender has been really good. I haven’t had a 3rd party AV installed for nearly 10 years.
