Bitdefender may be fine for you if you don’t want to take any responsibility for your system, and trust Bitdefender to make only good decisions. Or maybe you don’t care if it makes a limited number of bad decisions. After all, you probably have a few hundred thousand files on your PC and really care if a few are deleted.
I’ve used Bitfefender for a few years (paid for Internet Security license and several renewals) but am looking now for something better.
When it finds a file it doesn’t like, it either deletes it, tries to repair it, sends it to quarantine, or denies access to it. You can choose the action to be taken in advance. A week ago it quarantined one of my files. The file could not be recovered because the quarantine process corrupted the file. This has happened before. Since quarantine is not reliable, I set Bitdefender to deny access and tried to copy my file from a backup image. Sure enough, Bitdefender denied access. Problem: there is no function in Bitdefender to allow access once it’s denied. So delete, quarantine, and deny access, are essentially all the same – they prevent me or anyone else from accessing the file. I don’t get to decide what happens to my files because Bitdefender assumes it knows more than I do.
Their support team would not provide any answer other than telling me the file was properly flagged as bad. No attempt to explain how to regain access, no explanation for why quarantine failed. And no way to tell Bitdefender to warn me but do nothing if it finds a suspicious file. And the “bad” file? A password recovery program. Yes, it could do bad stuff in the hands of evil people, but it was useful for me in a situation at work and in helping friends. An internet search summarized the situation: an antivirus program can only evaluate a file based on what it can do, not on its intended purpose.
Only after looking at log files did I realize that options I enabled, like scanning for rootkits, do not take place. I felt secure for a few years, now I feel betrayed. And I understand why scans were so fast, it didn’t scan much of my C: drive and nothing else. That may by my fault for not spending a few days analyzing and working with the product when I first installed it. I could have set up “custom” scans but never got far because it looked like the only customization was for scheduling. If you get past that, and look in advanced scan options, there’s more to it. Does it really scan for rootkits if you enable it here also? Don’t think I’ll ever know.
Can anyone recommend a GOOD antimalware/firewall product? Is Windows Defender good again? Does Windows firewall (Win 10) block incoming and outgoing access now? Thanks.