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On Windows machine it's pretty much impossible not to. Try installing Windows XP on a virtual box without any firewall setup, and within a day(or even hour) you
by niuzeta 13y ago
On Windows machine it's pretty much impossible not to. Try installing Windows XP on a virtual box without any firewall setup, and within a day(or even hour) you will get infected. Windows Defender is fairly reliable as far as I've heard, but I'd be happier knowing that someone more qualified who specifically does that for a living is looking over.
Also, when you have non-tech-savvy families you generally want to just get a cover-multiple-pc-at-a-license deals, just because it saves you a lot of hassles.
- bcoates 13y agoWhat, like the original release of XP from 2001? I'm trying to find a worm that uses a vulnerability that works on an out of the box, unpatched XP SP3 and the closest I can find is Conflicker and related MS08-067 worms, but even that requires turning off the on-by-default firewall or enabling non-default sharing settings.
- cpncrunch 13y agoEven if you're tech savvy it's still fairly easy to get infected by a trojan on a hijacked site. I use ff/chrome and avast! on Windows, which seems to be sufficient protection.
- ceejayoz 13y agoI'm a Mac guy, but come on. Windows XP is 12 years old. That's hardly a fair test. I haven't seen reports of Windows 7/8 machines getting rapidly infected like XP did. I think you can be assured that the Windows Defender team does antivirus stuff for a living, just as much as AV vendors do.
- ikt 13y agocryptolocker, winxp to win8, it's a problem
- ceejayoz 13y agoCryptolocker requires the user to run the executable. Users doing that are going to get infected regardless of OS.
- mnw21cam 13y agoYes, but the expected time of survival of a newly-installed WinXP machine was extraordinarily short eight or so years ago - not really long enough to enable one to connect to Windows Update and get the thing protected.
- iaskwhy 13y agoBut that would be a firewall and not an antivirus software.
- Encosia 13y agoOn an un-patched, un-updated Windows XP machine, maybe. From Vista onward, the built-in software firewall and UAC make a default install relatively safe. I never ran any real-time virus protection on Vista and 7 (though I did run a few manual scans just to be sure, which were all clean) on a variety of machines and never had any issues.