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Yo, this is my first post and it's probably a stupid question but what are your thought on antivirus on Windows and Mac? If there is anything you would recommend, Both paid and free, what would you recommend? I know that most people will just reply with "Just use your brain, you don't need antivirus" "Mac don't get virus" or "Windows defender is enough" but for someone as paranoid as me, it's the same as telling me that Corona isn't going to affect me as long as I stay away from people who have the disease. TL:DR, Gimme some thoughts on antivirus and what you would recommend if I want to get one or two on either Windows and Mac (I have both).

Hello, Some years ago we had a teacher in college that explained to us that most machines connected to the internet after many years of use by "amateurs" will get infected vy a virus in some way or another. At the time, this seemed reasonable so I've been thinking this way and everything seems fine. When I updated to windows 10 I started using just windows defender as antivirus protection since that is what I was told I should do. My question is: Am I wrong? I feel like most people I know think as I do... If this is naive or outdated I'd like to know and I can't find much information about it. And even when I do, it's very technical and confusing to explain to others to verify it.... I'm currently using Windows 10 with everything up to date. I checked on windows defender and I ran the most in depth scan available in the app. It says No threats. Is this reliable or my pc might be infected with all kinds of stuff that WD just can't detect? Any information will be appreciated but keep in mind that I work in video and my background knowledge in this topic is very poor... Thanks!

Hi, guys I have a dilemma . I’ve been using this kaspresky Internet security antivirus Program for years . And I discovered a flaw. I have signed up with giga speed Internet and I discovered while the antivirus is protecting my computer. It slows down my Internet speed from 902 Mbps to 300 Mbps. The only way I can get the full Internet speed it’s a shut down the Internet security antivirus program. I even contacted their support service for help. They took over my computer to try and resolve my problem and they can’t . They keep saying they send it tier 1 Tech support And they will contact me back. And now they send me an email saying it’s going to tier 2 to tech-support to support. It’s like they know they have a problem and they won’t admit, they can’t fix it. any suggestion guys, anybody . It would be appreciated if anybody can resolve it for me Thanks

I don't use antivirus on any of my pcs(not even on my windows xp laptop, i don't use it that often though).

Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/avast-antivirus-user-browsing-data-sold https://nypost.com/2020/01/28/popular-antivirus-tracked-users-porn-browsing-habits-report/amp/ Avast was collecting what it’s users are searching up on Google, Google Maps, LinkedIn, etc. most important! They were collecting data on what type of porn you watch from websites like YouPorn and PornHub. just great... and selling it to other companies like Microsoft, Google, Pepsi, etc.

I'm building a new PC and was wondering if I need to install an antivirus in 2019. I used Avast on my old desktop and it did seem to have quite a performance hit. I'm currently using Bitdefender Free on my laptop and it's running smoothly. But is Windows Defender enough in 2019?

Hey Everyone, I'm just on here to look for what peoples opinons are. So we have Norton antivirus ending soon (I know its paid for, but it was good for my parents at the time) and really we don't want to spend money on a subscription and want to save money in the long run. We also have a wireless router that was supplied from my ISP, I know I don't have to say but it is of average quality but we tolerated it. Now is the time I am thinking whether to upgrade to alot better router, end norton antivirus and use the built in Microsoft defender and some preventative teaching to keep my home network safe. I am quite experienced with networking so the more advanced nature of networking isn't really scary, but I have not been in this predicament before so I don't really know the non enterprise options that are good. So what I would like to know is what are the some of the best routers for the best experience, seciuirty and speed I could get for a maximum of around £150 to £200. I see some that are Asus and Netgear and just think whether these are more secure than my current router and will at least be a good combination with the built in Antivirus. Some information to note: Most devices are Windows 10 or android 7+. I don't have IoT devices (Alexa or google home) I have some smart TV's from samsung. My ISP is Virgin Media (UK) Router is Virgin Provided SuperHub 3 I hope to have some help in deciding the most secure router I could get that is also a known and supported brand. Thanks Jake

I'm looking at either Norton or bit defender but don't know which is better. Any inputs are appreciated.

I need some help here, I know labeling one Antivirus software over /the next one is not good practice as everyone has there own options on it. I am not one for starting fights or debates either, I am just another tech geek or nerd trying to find a good multifocal Antivirus. I have been all over the internet looking for new, upkeep, maybe lowcost, good, software. I have been guilty of using Norton products for years and yes I tried a few others here and there but always went back to what feels comfortable to me. But I want to break that as I kept notes and Norton is falling down the Security list. Now a cording to https://www.top10bestantivirus.com/security-comparison?land=7 Norton is at number 5. TotalAV 2019 is the top Antivirus but if you look at all the functions Total AV, PCProtect and ScanGuard use all functions listed, ok so then out of those three who is better are is all three do the same? Also, this site says Norton does not offer a Firewall when they do, Norton does also offer a Password manager, Identity Protection and so on unless they're dropping these features. I know BitDefender is a good one right now because their free version is topnotch. I just want a good Antivirus-malware protection for me and my families computers. Yes I understand tech but in my own simple way but this all in going over my head, now maybe Linus could do an Antivirus break down video on who is the best with all the Security features one needs as Norton is starting to be too much, yes I know one it's a yearly pay but still are they safe enough as one can be without going off the grid.

Does AVAST Premium have this thing called RTP like Malwarebytes? I think it does but I'm looking specifically for this feature that does this => When I was using Malwarebytes before I get these notifications when I'm downloading stuff but now I'm using Avast Premium I don't see any notifications like this or is it hidden somewhere in the software? Can someone help please. And if someone is gonna say "Why not just use Malwarebytes then" or stuff like that then it's because it is expensive AF compared to Avast Premium.

Specs of laptop: Lenovo Ideapad 330 15ARR CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3300U RAM: 8gb ddr4 1tb HDD GPU: AMD Radeon VEGA Mobile Laptop is about a year and a half old OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 bit Security: Bitdefender Total Security 2020 Laptop originally came with Windows 10 home (64 bit), about a couple months ago I upgraded to Pro and reinstalled bitdefender with it. Around a few weeks ago the fan was running high even when laptop was "idle". I looked in task manager and bitdefender was using anywhere between 20-40% of cpu all the time. This combined with a google meet with obs recording for school and it gets 100% of Cpu. I've tried everything in the settings. Even disabling everything I could find, but bitdefender still used the cpu quite a bit. The only temporary solution is to restart the computer, which keeps bitdefender at 0% most of the time, but after about 10 minutes it goes back up to constantly 30%. I would get other security, but I paid $100 for total security with a VPN. Is anyone else having this problem or know a solution? Is there any way to actually stop the bitdefender tray and service? If I try to stop it in task manager it says that I do not have permission. Is there any way to gain the "permission" to end the task? Thanks for the help!

My quick heal av lisence expires today, I wanna know is Free Avast is good or Paid Avast? or should I get Mcafee Antivirus from Amazon.in (link) which is really really cheap ($8 for 3 years 1 device). Quick heal Total Security is kinda expensive like $47. I just need a real time protection av which is good at detecting virus and potential viruses.

Source: AV-Comparatives Stalkerware Test 2020 (Windows and Android), Electronic Frontier Foundation Do you think your spouse or partner already went down low to spy on you by installing malware on your phone? Good news! Major antivirus vendors has gotten better in detecting and blocking stalkerware. One of you might ask as to what's the difference between the stalkerware used by overly jealous spouses and a parent installing a parental control app or a MDM solution to track employees on the go, the answer as provided by AV-Comparatives is that stalkerware will try its best to stay under the radar to avoid detection and uninstallation, whereas parental control or corporate MDM solutions are quite explicit on what they do and its presence. Parental control apps allows parents to track the location of their kids to make sure they don't go elsewhere other than school and home. As EFF security researcher Eva Galperin said in an interview [here] [here], stalkerware potentiates domestic abuse. Just think of it this way, you're on your way to work but all of a sudden your phone's battery is draining fast even though it's fairly new and fully charged. Then you pulled your phone out of your purse or bag and you noticed that it's getting hot. Then you tried to dig into the settings and you find out that there are apps installed that you're unfamiliar of. Or better yet, you opened a browser window and you notice that in the task manager/activity monitor that network activity is a bit high on Chrome but there aren't any extensions visible in the upper right side. Little did you know, your spouse has installed a spying app to track everything you do online. Then once you got home, you are greeted by an angry spouse/partner because he/she has seen your Facebook chat with a friend. So what happened next is that both of you started raising voices until one will either verbally humiliate your or worse, physically assaults you. Or if the abuser is such a sadist, he/she will not only verbally and physically abuse you, he/she can use it for character assassination or defamation. As Eva Galperin pointed out, it all started with a tweet below in 2018 and she has received 10K retweets just a few hours ago and her inbox then became filled of abuse stories from both men and women related to stalkerware. While she made it clear that she also received stories about men being abused either by another men, women abused by women, or men abused by women, the vast majority are women being abused by men through spying. The problem however with stalkerware is that even though they are maliciously intended, they are commercially sold. Typically hackers would go to dark web forums to look for exploitable vulnerabilities or perform deep reconnaissance on an organization, jealous spouses don't need to do that. All you need to do is to Google it. It will show you list of apps for spying. Here's a popular spying program for Android named Cocospy. As you can see, it will demand you to turn off Google Play Protect and allow installation outside of the Play Store. So this prompted this lady to force the antivirus industry to take stalkerware seriously. As you have seen in the first two photos above, 2019 is where most of AV products for both Android and Windows have sloppy detection scores for stalkerware, but now in 2020 they have improved which is a plus for privacy. I can't say the same for iOS since Apple doesn't allow security products to be installed other than URL blockers. At the moment, you're best option is to turn off Find My Friends and make sure it isn't jailbroken as Apple has a strong App Store policy on tracking apps I assume. Here's her advice on stalkerware and abusive spouses: If a spouse or partner is forcing you to give him/her your passwords for various online accounts, it's already a red flag. Turn off biometrics especially fingerprint unlock so that your phone cannot be abused. If you're using Android or Windows, run a full system scan preferably with two or three vendors and compare detection results. If the antivirus detected a potentially unwanted spying program, do not quarantine or neutralize the threat yet, instead go to the authorities and report it. And here's my personal advice on failing relationships, "if you're currently unhappy with your current relationship, ask yourself if you're dating the person of your dreams or just the person within your reach". Don't be a martyr because no one will build a statue for you just because you think that person is going to change. Think about yourself and if you have kids, think about their safety.

Hi all, I brought a relative's old laptop back to life with a copy of Xubuntu, and I recently installed ClamAV (although I'm not quite sure I did everything right). Whenever I initiate a scan in the terminal, a lot of areas seem to have an "Access Denied" error. Here's the full log, which came after I inputted "sudo clamdscan" ----- /home/xubi/.Xauthority: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.xsession-errors: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.xsession-errors.old: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.bash_history: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.pEp_management.db: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.pEp_management.db-wal: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.pEp_management.db-shm: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/user-dirs.dirs: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/libreoffice/4: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/xfce4/xfwm4: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/xfce4/desktop: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/xfce4/terminal: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/xfce4/src/misc: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/pulse: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/gtk-3.0: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/update-notifier: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/dconf: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/Thunar: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.config/Mousepad: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.gnupg: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/sessions: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/thumbnails: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/obexd: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/mozilla: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/xfce4/notifyd/icons: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.cache/thunderbird: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.local/share: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.mozilla: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/vlc/1700/.config: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/vlc/1700/.local/share/vlc: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/vlc/common/vlcrc: Access denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/vlc/common/.cache/vlc: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/bitwarden/28/.pki: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/bitwarden/28/appdata: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/signal-desktop/327/.config: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/signal-desktop/327/.pki: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/signal-desktop/common/.cache/mesa_shader_cache: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/audacity/675/.config: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/snap/audacity/666/.config: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.thunderbird: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR /home/xubi/.pEp: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR ----------- SCAN SUMMARY ----------- Infected files: 0 Total errors: 43 Time: 19.643 sec (0 m 19 s) -----

Hi guys, We're having a big problem with our Sophos AV right now. It started having some issues after a big update with the software and now every time we open any apps on Windows its prompting an error, "C:\Windows\system32\SophosAV\SOPHOS~1.DLL is ether not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error." I already searched from their forum and support section and they come up with the solution to update Windows or specifically install KB4474419 and KB4490628. But the problem is i can't install both. It says, "The update is not compatible to your computer" even if i downloaded the right installer to the corresponding architecture. Any help or advice would be a huge deal for me. Thank you os

I have some questions regarding PW's. First, how do you protect your PW from viruses and keyloggers. You can have the best passwords, but when someone has access to your computer they see everything. Second, should one TFA the PW with a physical key or is it enough to use email for that? And why? You have a phone with you everywhere, anyway. Third, there are Apple Notes you can encrypt and there are PW notes. Which one is better to use and why?

i have a question do i need to have a third part antivirus like bitdefender free antivirus if i have windows defender on my windows 10 gaming pc and i want to know bc i have some ram issue and i guess it's bc i have a third part antivirus so i wonder if i only need windows defender on my windows pc and not a third part antivirus too

Title says it all... Was having a very irritating and persistent issue where my PC would randomly wake up after i put it to sleep (around 5-10 mins after, sometimes longer) Since this issue persisted even after I reset and defaulted power settings I decided to do some digging through event viewer and found this (1st image), from what i can see it looks like malwarebytes, which i have installed on my pc, keeps waking the system for 'serivceinstallation'. (drivers) Knowing that all my dirvers are up to date, i looked up what this 'MBAMSwissArmy' program was, and I discovered that it seems pretty harmless, just some software that allows Malwarebytes to communicate with hardware, but my question stands - why would it need to reinstall WHILE THE PC IS ASLEEP for gods sake when I've already fully installed the antivirus?

Hey all, So here's the situation. At work I had a colleague forward an email asking if it was legitimate. Upon quickly determining it was phishing I asked if she had opened the attached file, and she had. After installing Bitdefender on her machine it did turn out an infection (Trojan.Agent.DELU) and there were some shady files in the startup that started a windows process marked as vulnerability. And here comes the topic question: Can you retroactively find out what had been done to your PC after threat detection? Without a priori installing monitoring and logging software, can you find out what had been done to your system? And does the Trojan name giveaway somehow the possible vulnerabilities that were exploited or all of them are backdoors into everything?

What free antivirus/antimalware do you recommend? I currently have AntiMalwareBytes free, is it good enough or should I change? I want to keep my computer safe, even if it reduces a bit of performance it's fine.

Honestly though, how? Such a simple task that Windows just basically ruined in another crap update. Every site I've gone to including Microsoft says go to the history tab but ever since one of these new updates, they completely redone Windows Defender and the history tab is gone. I don't even know what version I'm on. Please help.

My sister bought a cheap ultra light notebook and now whats me to find an antivirus program for it rather then just win defender. Being a Lenovo Ideapad 100s so win10 itself is almost too heavy for it already, It only has 2Gb ram and a very weak CPU. That's on top of only 32Gb storage. So I need something free, light and allows exclusions... so far the "lightest" free ones I have found are supposedly Bitdefender and Avast but each have major drawbacks. Like too many popups or lack of settings and preemptive exclusions options... any advice out there?

Any suggestions on free anitmalware and antivirus programs? Im looking for a good one that is trustworthy and actually does a good job of scanning and removing.

So, Sometime an hour ago, My computer updated the firmware for the Logitech G430 Headset which required me to unplug and replug the headset. Windows didn't like that and it bluescreened, Something about "System exception not handled". Regardless, I started the computer back up and launched chrome, This happened. The thing that strikes me the most, is that the only reason that i have it installed, Is because Linus featured it in a video, plus the free subscription. So, in other words, WHAT? Thank you all for your time, GTinsider