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#281
…. 7.... simply visit legit (e.g. New York Times), safe site with bad link in advertisement which exploit not yet patched vulnerability. Some bad code get installed, silent (everything can happen in memory, no files) and waiting …Hi folks
the fear of Virus infection is actually far worse than the event itself
Interesting quote from Inauguration of President Roosevelt
……. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days ……..,.
So if you actually take account the % of Computers getting infected (remember I'm going with HOME rather than Corporate machines --that's a whole different ballgame) around 99.99% of people will never see a computer infection ever on their machines.
Do people really need this type of software any more (at least on Home computers).
WD is more than adequate -- most problems are caused by :
1) scamming -- people being mislead to give away account details, people being persuaded to pay money into bank accounts other than the intended ones - e.g fake websites purporting to offer tax refunds, service providers asking you to send money to another account instead of the original one etc etc
2) People opening attachments on emails without knowing who the senders are
3) downloading .exe, .rar, .zip etc archive type files from torrent sites (if you must use these then proper data type files like .mp3, .mkv etc will usually not cause problems
4) people panicking via Ransomware -- simply IMMEDIATELY unplug computer - don't power off via Windows menu, unplug all external devices, disconnect from internet and restore clean image -- Free Macrium etc is more than sufficient for that type of job.
5) giving out too much info on social media sites.
6) logging on to obviously dubious websites and warez type of stuff where again 99.9% of users don't do that anyway.
Attackers want your money - and that's usually done by scams that any amount of A/V software can't stop. Of course serious big time hackers will go for corporates where interruption say of cloud services, scraping user account data or even just making political statements against big corporations via Denial of Service techniques etc is a much better target than hacking relatively impoverished individuals home machines.
The world has moved on hugely since Windows 7 days where Windows security was a total joke unless you installed serious A/V software.
Back in those heady times the threat was usually from some teen pranksters just doing it for fun -- it's much more sophisticated these days with big money as the reward and some impoverished sub teen's machine in a bedroom doesn't present a particularly interesting target worth while attacking.
Now this is only my interpretation and it might be controversial but I really think that for home computers any of these 3rd party products are a total waste of time and resources as WD is built right into the heart of the OS , works very well indeed and is updated extremely frequently.
Note for corporate I.T security -- that as I have said is a totally different Ballgame.
Note also nothing in this post says that you shouldn't have A/V software installed -- the question is what and how much of it.
People also should regularly take image backups of their systems - there's so much free good software out there to do this that I still find it inconceivable when people get bogged down into discussing every possible virus scenario on the planet while not taking the most simple prevention of all -- a clean backup.
Macrium (Free version) is probably the most used and recommended one on this Forum -- there are others if you want to try them too -- there's absolutely no excuse for not having decent backup now.
Cheers
jimbo
I rather get some extra protection.
Thanks Cliff S for the heads up
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