Windows security...

[Lindley]

Hi,

There are thousands of web pages on this subject but be interesting  to know what our hopefully more informed EEVbblog members use on their Windows PCs  for protection ?

Windows Defender and Firewall,   Other Free AVs and Firewalls,   or complete security suites from the usual players like  Bit Defender, Eset, Kaspersky, Norton etc.

[andy3055]

I use Bitdefender: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/bitdefender-antivirus-free-edition

Light weight and works in the background. Always warns when a site looks suspisious.

[Mr. Scram]

Hi,

There are thousands of web pages on this subject but be interesting  to know what our hopefully more informed EEVbblog members use on their Windows PCs  for protection ?

Windows Defender and Firewall,   Other Free AVs and Firewalls,   or complete security suites from the usual players like  Bit Defender, Eset, Kaspersky, Norton etc.

Microsoft Defender is all you need nowadays. It's top of the list in essentially any test. This is the one area where "the cloud" and having millions of clients in the field keeping Microsoft posted on any and all new developments is a boon. Bonuses are not increasing your attack surface and the lack of additional costs.

Thread devolving into another OS row in 3...

[Halcyon]

Despite my hatred for Windows 10, Windows overall is actually pretty secure for the most part. Defender does a pretty good job for most consumers. The vast majority of issues occur when users install or click on the wrong thing and insist on ignoring the warnings.

[JustMeHere]

Defender works well enough.

I had to return Bit Defender due to false positives. I've also had a few colleagues with the same issue.  Damn shame they used to be top notch.

[andy3055]

You are correct. Bitdefender seems to have lost it's game since I wrote last. I get all sorts of false positives. They also don't seem to want to address issues on the free version. My credit union was getting blocked and they never came up with a solution. But, out of the blues, it started working ok again. I still keep it as false positives are better than no positives!

[UART.io]

Microsoft Defender is all you need nowadays. It's top of the list in essentially any test. This is the one area where "the cloud" and having millions of clients in the field keeping Microsoft posted on any and all new developments is a boon. Bonuses are not increasing your attack surface and the lack of additional costs.

Thread devolving into another OS row in 3...

Kinda resurrecting this thread, but this topic is my forte.

Defender is solid. Running that along with keeping the OS patched and up to date(it should do this automatically by default) is usually "good enough". The only other thing I highly recommend is a good browser(Firefox, Chrome, etc) with a good ad blocker like uBlock Origin. Not only does this make the browsing experience better, but ad networks have been known to distribute malicious content.

Aside from that, exercise extreme caution when downloading and executing programs, opening e-mail attachments(even MS Word docs, excel files, etc).

There's other more advanced stuff that can be done, but then you really start getting into the nitty-gritty stuff that is difficult to manage. App whitelisting, etc.

edit: The Windows account you use normally shouldn't be an Administrator account - just use a regular user account. Have a separate Admin account/password that you type in whenever you need to make major changes to the Windows settings/etc.