For Any BitDefenders Users, Please

Robert11 · 12 Dec 2015

Hello all,

Thanks for previous help and advice.

Brand new desktop of a month or so,
Bought BitDefender for it, per a lot of advice on Forum.

My old PC was wiped out by one of thosE RansomWare trojans (Crypto...?), so am very concerned
that it doesn't happen again.

BitDefender's help system leaveS a lot to be desired, so thought I would ask here.

My assumption was that once installed, it "automatically" works to prevent any of these
Ransomware trojans, as well as the more conventional virus'.

But, apparently not ?

Had the PC a month with BitDefender, and for the first time a screen popped up asking what, if any, Folders
I would like to prevent being infected by Ransomware. You could then add as many, apparently, Folders as you would like.

Huh ?

I thought it worked on Everything in the PC, and certainly not that you had to specify which
ones (only) you wanted protected, and also that all of this was handled automatically without the user having
to specify "which ones" to protect..

Does this mean that if I neglected to add a Folder to their list, it is not protected from "any ransomware, Crypto, etc." ?
Why didn't this screen show up during the initial installation ?

Probably hopeless to try to get an answer from their Help Desk, so thought I would ask here.
Everyone here, as well as the W7 Forum are just so great and helpful.

Any thoughts on all of this would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
B.

dalchina · 14 Dec 2015

Hi, can only offer trivial thoughts although I've used Bitdefender for a year or two.
1. I would agree, you might think it would prompt to suggest configuring the Ransomware module during installation. (I don't recall that happening).
2. It's potentially intrusive- there's a learning curve. (Think UAC, Vista, maybe??)
"You'll want to dig in and enable Bitdefender's Ransomware Protection, which is turned off by default. When you do, you'll see that it protects the Pictures and Documents folders for each user on the system. You can add more folders to the protected list.

Any time a non-approved program attempts to modify a file in one of these folders, Bitdefender denies it access and pops up a warning. If it's a legitimate application that you meant to launch, perhaps an off-brand word processor, you can click Allow to whitelist the program. Any program not whitelisted won't be able to touch those files."

3. Where your user data is located is highly variable. Since the aim is to protect that, it is not unreasonable it needs telling what's important.

As for protection vs ransomware, consider
a. Cryptoprevent (not tried on Win 10 yet).
b. Use disk imaging periodically to create a full backup which you maintain.
this means
- if your system is compromised, you can restore it as it was
- you have access to your data (from the images you've created) - so you can ignore ransom demands.

I tried turning on the protection briefly and found I was getting a lot of prompts, and turned it off. I've not yet experimented further. That this was so is not perhaps surprising as my Documents folder is full of folders created by installed programs as workspace. (Thus what was 'My Documents' is more like 'Their Documents'

)

I keep my documents on a different partition.

Robert11 · 14 Dec 2015

Hello

Thank you for such good info.

If I load and use CryptoPrevent, do I
have to delete BitDefender ?

e. g. do they play nicely together, or...?

Thanks again,
Bob

dalchina · 14 Dec 2015

Hi, I used Cryptoprevent with Bitdefender under Win 8.. the mechanism of both is utterly different, so no conflict.

There's no overhead with the former.

axe0 · 14 Dec 2015

The new function of Bitdefender, prevention of ransomware encryption, is something you have to configure a little.
You only have to say what Bitdefender needs to protect for you manually 1-time and Bitdefender takes care of everything else.

simrick · 14 Dec 2015

CryptoPrevent by FoolishIT simply uses Group Policies to prevent executables/malware from executing inside folders like %AppData% and such, where normal programs would not have executables. It is an enhancement to any AV and does not conflict at all.