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.
Seriously? This is an actual question?
Exhibit 1:
Check for yourself: https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/
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”).
