Current Microsoft patches are causing havoc. Don't patch. This topic has 24 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 3 days, 19 hours ago. Topic New Reply. Cybertooth AskWoody Plus. December 9, at pm Important news for those who have been using Bitdefender Free: I have received an email from Bitdefender stating the following: As of 1st of January , Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition will officially be discontinued and no longer available for use.
After reminding the reader that Microsoft stops supporting Windows 7 on January 14, , the company states the following: Bitdefender will continue to provide antimalware support to Windows 7 users for the next 24 months.
Reply Quote. Viewing 12 reply threads. Fred AskWoody Plus. December 10, at am TonyS AskWoody Plus. TonyS wrote:. Myst , TonyS. Myst AskWoody Plus. December 11, at am I use Norton Deluxe on my Win7 and it works great. Have had it for years with no issues. Alex AskWoody Plus. December 10, at pm Cybertooth wrote:. JohnW AskWoody Plus. EP wrote:. December 13, at pm JohnW wrote:. December 15, at pm Microfix , Cybertooth. January 10, at am Anything changed?
So in essence, If you already have Bitdefender Free on your system, definitions and updates will continue to be distributed until 30th June End of Support: June 30, That End of Support date not to be confused with the End of Life date of December 31, when updates will stop is June 30, when After this date, the product will also reach its End of Support Life.
Cancel Submit. Subscribe to the AskWoody Free Newsletter. We promise not to spam you. Unsubscribe at any time. Welcome to our unique respite from the madness. Plus Membership Donations from Plus members keep this site going. Search Newsletters Search for:. Search Forums Search for: Advanced Search. All Rights Reserved. Link Text. Over 20 well-known security suites were tested through hundreds of URL calls. These functions are a firewall filter , protection of minors, data shredder and the cloud spam protection.
Bitdefender, like many of its competitors, is incompatible with other anti-virus and anti-spyware software.
Bitdefender also provides the Bitdefender Mechanic app for free. According to Bitdefender, this app has the functions of privacy protection, memory cleaning and program update reminders. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus for Mac also scans shared folders of Windows users using a so-called proactive scan. In addition is Internet Explorer version 7 or higher is required and.
A truly effective phishing protection system analyzes pages for signs of fraud and blocks even those too new to be blacklisted. Some products, such as Norton, distinguish between blacklisted sites and those identified by analysis. I prepare for this test by scouring phishing-analysis sites for the latest reported frauds, making sure to get a goodly number that are too new for the blacklist.
I launch each in four browsers. The product under test protects one, of course, while the other three rely on protection built into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. If one or more browsers can't load a page, I discard it. If the page isn't clearly attempting to steal login credentials, likewise I toss it. When I have enough data points, I run the numbers. For a deeper dive on this sneaky threat, you should read our piece on How to Avoid Phishing Scams. This sort of protection is more commonly associated with a firewall, but a few antivirus products such as Bitdefender and Norton include it.
To see this feature in action, I bombarded the test system with odd exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration tool. This collection includes exploits aimed at Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and several Adobe products, among others. Some products flag exploits using their official CVE name. Note that none of the exploits succeeded in breaching the fully patched test system. Exploit protection isn't a core antivirus component, especially if you keep your operating system and applications up to date, but in Bitdefender's case it's a nice bonus.
In addition to the very visible protection against dangerous and fraudulent websites, Bitdefender also includes an Anti-Tracker component. Note that you no longer need to install the separate Traffic Light extension, as the online threat protection system handles the task of marking up search results with colored icons, green for safe, red for dangerous, grey for not yet checked.
I found it odd that Bitdefender supplies this extension for Internet Explorer but not for Microsoft Edge, given the very strong push Microsoft is making to get people away from Internet Explorer. When you visit a site containing ad trackers, site analytics trackers, or other trackers, Bitdefender puts the number of trackers on the extension's toolbar icon.
By default, its active Do Not Track system blocks them all. You can click for a summary by category, which includes an estimate of the page load time saved. And you can disable blocking of specific categories. No antivirus is perfect. They all occasionally miss a brand-new attack. Bitdefender has been on the cutting edge of ransomware protection , and the current edition includes several layers of protection against pernicious ransomware that aims to protect you even against brand-new types of ransomware.
The Advanced Threat Defense feature supplements regular antivirus scanning with behavior-based detection, including detection of ransomware behavior. Network Threat Prevention blocks the exploit avenues some ransomware attacks rely on.
At the first hint of a possible ransomware attack, Ransomware Remediation backs up important files, restoring them after Bitdefender neutralizes the attack. Ransomware necessarily modifies your important files, replacing them with encrypted versions. One simple defense is to ban all changes to files in protected locations unless the program making the change is authorized.
Avast Premium Security , Panda, and Trend Micro are among the suites that employ this type of ransomware protection. There are a few problems with this technique. First, it adds a speed bump any time you edit files with a new valid program. Second, and more important, it relies on the user to decide whether a file is trustworthy.
Maybe your finger slipped, and you clicked Allow by accident. You could accidentally release an attack. The Bitdefender Shield real-time protection components wiped out all my actual ransomware samples on sight. For testing purposes, I reverted the virtual machine back to a snapshot before that initial cleanup and turned off Bitdefender Shield real-time protection. Almost all my ransomware samples are the common file-encrypting type, though I do have one screen locker and one whole-disk encryptor.
Remember, though: I had to disable numerous real-time protection layers to even perform this test. I've occasionally run across ransomware protection systems that don't start early enough at boot time and hence can miss ransomware loaded at startup.
To check Bitdefender's boot-time protection, I copied several samples that triggered protection into the Startup folder and rebooted. Bitdefender eliminated them all. I also tried running KnowBe4's RanSim ransomware simulator. Ransomware-specific protection components are showing up in more and more antivirus products, but most don't go as far as Bitdefender.
It blocks unauthorized changes to protected files, detects ransomware behavior, and restores any files that got encrypted before the behavior-based detection kicked in. Webroot uses behavior-based detection, and its journal-and-rollback system for handling behavior of unknown files can even reverse the effects of ransomware, magically restoring your encrypted files.
Password management is a feature more commonly found in security suites than in standalone antivirus products. Bitdefender's Wallet feature stores passwords, personal information, and credit card details for use on websites. It also saves passwords for applications and Wi-Fi networks. Wallet has changed very little in the last few versions. It requires a strong master password , separate from your Bitdefender Central password.
It allows the creation of multiple wallets password databases , and lets you choose whether to sync between devices or keep passwords local-only. And it automatically captures login credentials as you type them and replays them as needed. In testing, it managed standard password entry forms but couldn't handle some two-page login systems.
Wallet doesn't store as much personal data for web forms as some dedicated password managers, but it correctly filled all the fields that it does store. When you're signing up for a new account, you can use Wallet's password generator , which defaults to creating character passwords made of letters and numbers.
That's a good default length, but I advise enabling the use of special characters, for even stronger passwords. Wallet completely handles the basics of password management but doesn't go much beyond that.
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