What if defender failed and didn't warn/ alert you ?
I could ask you exactly the same question—what if your 3rd party antivirus failed and didn't warn/alert you?
Nothing offers 100% protection. Your expensive 3rd party antivirus software can easily miss a threat as my free Defender. This is why you should always look at all the ways malware can infect your PC and "patch the holes".
First line of defense—your brain. You have it, I have it, we all have it; so use it! If something looks fishy, it's fishy. Don't download torrents and files from suspicious sites; ALWAYS read comments. If you're
and sailing the high seas, download only from reputable websites and look at seeder number. Pirates don't tend to seed malware. Some people have e-mail client; disable automatic loading of images and never download or open suspicious attachments, coming from unknown sender. If you don't expect any mail and files, then do not open. If you expect the mail from Nigerian prince, then go ahead and open it. But chances are, you don't know any royals who need the money.
Let's move on... 98% of the time when you're using PC, you're in your web browser of choice. It's easily the most used piece of software on all PCs connected to the internet. Hence, this is what I like to call
"second line of defense" (first one being brain, remember?)
; because it really is. Firefox and Chrome, both use Google Safe Browsing which provides more than great protection against malicious site and even files. Edge uses SmartScreen instead of Google Safe Browsing which is really, really good as well. If you like, you could also install an additional extension like
Bitdefender TrafficLight and have Bitdefender's top notch web protection for free. You're still suspicious? Consider using malware-blocking DNS like Quad9 which will prevent access to malicious sites on network level. I hope I don't have to mention ad blocker as this is the first thing you install after installing a web browser.
Now the only thing you need is to keep your web browser up-to-date.
And finally, the third line of defense. That's the antivirus software and all modules it has. Its job is to block the malware in case web browser didn't manage to stop it. Defender along SmartScreen provides an extra layer of protection and has bunch of different modules which will protect you free of charge. Not to mention, Defender knows best around your OS and won't cause you any issues unlike 3rd party antivirus which integrates deep, but not at the level Defender does.
You saw a lot of clips how Defender misses a threat, an exploit disables it completely? Don't worry! This isn't a real-world test. If you have well protected first and second line of defense, there's hardly a chance something like that will come to the third line. Beside, those exploits people are so scared... let's say, you have higher chances to die in the next few hours than to get that kind of exploit. Exploit would have to pass DNS, filtering extension, Google/Microsoft's protection and ad blocker.
-- the license is good into April 2025.
