Bitdefender - Surprisingly good

Hey

Just wanted to add I've tested and bought Bitdefender for my new Win 10 system. (Build 18365.815)
It is surprisingly good!

I am an advanced user, who works with Windows and Mac support to end users.
I've tested most anti-evil code software. And so far Comodo been a favorite of mine because how much you can do with it.

However, Bitdefender, is pretty badword good at automaticly doing the right thing.
The VPN is brilliant! Only backside it they slow down your internet to 100Mbit. (I can live with that since the VPN is the most solid Ive found since Veritas File system on Unix)

Thats it, just wanted to add there is a good, simple, protection out there.
You need to buy it though. The free version is junk.

No antivirus can protect against the stuff out there that no-one currently knows about. That includes BitDefender among every other company offering these solutions. If you really wanted to test the ability of BitDefender simply hire a penetration testing team to get onto your system and you'll find your antivirus has very little to do with the overall prevention of unauthorised access. You'll find all you need to start the processing of accessing a computer without authorisation is a simple one-liner in CMD or Powershell. You can spend hundreds, thousands or even millions on computer security and all it takes is someone with a dodgy USB drive pretending to be a HID device and all your tech is now useless when your computer trusts this seemingly innocuous USB drive and lets it run whatever is on the drive. This is how the US government broke into the nuclear power plant in Iran. Do you not think these guys have antivirus? They have MILLIONS at their disposal for more than antivirus you get by downloading from a website. And yet a cheap USB drive backdoored a seemingly air-gapped network run by a rich and powerful government! The rest is history.

Antiviruses are however good at preventing, and to some extent predicting, what is happening or going to happen based on what has happened in the past. Signature based detection is among the most obsolete way of detecting nasty stuff but unfortunately, and contrary to what most people think, most AVs work solely on signature based detection. This means they analyse potential threats against known signatures for nasty stuff in their huge database of known nasty stuff. If it's not known then the chances are it's getting in and there's little you can do to stop it, presuming you can't pull the plug to your router in time. Newer methods like heuristics based detection is better than signature based because it works on the behaviour of files on your system and how your system is being utilised in response to changes being made. These are largely based on rules and algorithms and is flexible based on the changing models and modifications to the rules set by the antivirus software. This is reguarly updated and now with AI learning, antivirus software is constantly evolving at a rapid rate to the ever changing environments it is faced with.

But, it's still not enough. If you ask any IT security pro they will tell you that antivirus is among one of the last things they install on their system in terms of protection it provides. No really, check for yourself, do your research and you will see. Most IT sec guys know that an antivirus is primarily a false sense of security for the majority of people using computers who want to feel they are protected. When in reality, what they are protected by is a very small percentage of what actually lurks out in the wild, as they say in IT sec speak.

If you look at infections caused by viruses you will see they still occur. If antivirus worked like advertised we would see ZERO infections. Why do we see infections? Because no security package can ever keep up with what it doesnt know and/or understand. An antivirus cannot predict that Bob Taylor from 123 Street Avenue is tomorrow going to code and compile a new virus that will hold for ransom 500,000 computers within the first 24 hours. It has NO IDEA Bob Taylor even exists. It will only know there is a risk when that risk is found. How long will that be? Well, that could be an hour, 12, 24, a week, a month or even years. Just think Windows vulnerabilities are being discovered to this day that stem from Windows 95 and 98 onwards! Yeah, 25+ years on and vulnerabilities are still being discovered that have been there for over two decades! How many bad stuff do you think is out there which is operating on behalf of these vulnerabilities in software/hardware and of which HAVE NOT YET BEEN DISCOVERED? How many bugs are there in your browser you don't know about? How many bugs in the encryption software you use? On your smartphone? Your keyless car entry software/hardware?

This is the reality of security when we talk about the digital world. Welcome to the world we live in :)
That doesn't mean you shouldn't use antivirus. It just means you should be aware that like driving a car it doesn't matter how many airbags you have if you hit something at a bad angle, or the impact is hard enough, or other variables the airbags cannot account for, the outcome is going to be the same regardless of the protection methods in place. Do they help? Absolutely. But they are not magic bullets. On the internet things are taken to the extremes and these protections are completely superficial in terms of the bigger picture that exists beyond the facade most people see.