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.
You’d be surprised, these have already been found in the wild. They aren’t 0-days or anything, so they aren’t exactly secret or worth much. No more than any other cluster of code anyway.
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 😉
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.
I’m sorry the truth hurts you so deeply. You should probably seek council.
Lol you do
I’ll take “COMEBACKS THAT AREN’T ACTUALLY CLEVER” for $800, Alex!
As if the original response was any smarter 🤣
I have about 900 games not counting emulation.
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).
Cool. Have fun with that philosophy.
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.
Removed by mod
Aaand there’s the insult. Well done invalidating your already flimsy argument. Have a nice day
People will call you what you act like.
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.
I upload any suspicious files to virustotal.com.
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.
-
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 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
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.
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.
…do you still trust Windows…
lol, not since 2004, and I’ve never looked back!
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?
Sometimes AVs are literally viruses.
I use linux. But yeah, windows defender is fine. Do rgular scans with it, keep it updated and you should be fine.
Windows Defender has been really good. I haven’t had a 3rd party AV installed for nearly 10 years.
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.)
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.
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.
Defender + basic common sense = no viruses since Win7 for me too
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 pirate on Linux and don’t use that device for anything else. And I don’t pirate software or games where you are installing stuff.
