Everytime I browse Lemmy, my Bitdefender always pops up

Should I just ignore and/or whitelist this? Gotta admit it’s a bit c/MildlyInfuriating tho…

    • Syrc@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Eh, it’s kinda annoying but it does its job. Plus I hate subscriptions and the best free option I’ve found (I don’t think they do one-time payment AVs anymore?) is Avast + Malwarebytes. What do you suggest?

      • dragnet@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Just uninstall all of it and let Windows take care of itself. You don’t need antivirus. Do avoid obviously suspicious files, and you should be fine.

        • Syrc@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          That’s the thing, I’m really paranoid and I don’t trust my brain alone to judge what is an “obviously suspicious file”. I might be exaggerating, but better safe than sorry.

          • dragnet@lemmy.fmhy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Sure, but Windows Defender is built in and doesn’t suck. I have even heard security professionals make the argument that anti viruses may increase attack surface as much or more than they defend you (not necessarily asserting that is the case).

            • Anony Moose@lemmy.ca
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Windows Defender is great, and MS has been adding really advanced protection including machine learning heuristics, etc. that make it really competitive. It is not 100% foolproof though, there’s a lot of old and new viruses it will not detect.

              Check out some of the virus gauntlets this channel runs Windows Defender (and other AVs) through: https://youtu.be/1DG3y3q8_9M. Even the latest Defender will often fail to detect a lot of threats. Of course, this channel is running known bad infected executables, and the best line of defense is just not to run executables from unknown sources. It’s possible to just visit a malicious URL and get infected through JS though, so it gets a bit trickier.

              I’m not familiar with the argument that antivirus software will increase your attack surface. That sounds interesting, do you have any links I could read up on?

              • dragnet@lemmy.fmhy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                I wish I could give you links! I think I heard it on a security focused podcast? It has been quite some time since I tried to stay current on this sort of thing in more than a casual way.

                • Anony Moose@lemmy.ca
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  No worries, I am intrigued and will go looking for more information about this. It seems like the security space is ever evolving!