I have default windows defender, but didnt even know its antivirus lol. Is there any antivirus installed by default on any popular linux distro? What do you use?

I feel like antivirus can just annoy me when trying to crack something, but maybe defender protects me and im not aware.

  • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Windows Defender is enough. On your web browser you need uBlock origin. This means you need to use Chrome or Firefox as your web browser. *edit: Don’t bother with Chrome. Use Firefox. Someone replied to me with convincing reasons to just skip Chrome altogether.

      • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This person doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing, given the question, so I went for two options. I haven’t been using Chrome. Good call and thanks for correcting me. Google just gets more evil by the day, doesn’t it? I’ll edit my comment. Thanks again.

        • Ilandar@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Remember back in the day when their in-house motto or whatever was literally “do no evil”?

        • buckykat@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Yeah there’s a pretty fundamental conflict of interest in an advertising company controlling most of the world’s browsers.

            • buckykat@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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              1 year ago

              From the 1998 paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page:

              Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

            • DoomBot5@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Don’t worry, that person also left out the part that Google pushed that particular chrome update out indefinitely.

    • TheHalc@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Edge also supports uBlock Origin, but because it’s Chromium-based it faces the same issues as Chrome regarding Manifest V3.

      • SBS1313@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        U can also set Edge to bing as a search engine. Idk if Bing will shut down ad blockers. For me it works fine.

  • lemming007@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    No.

    Just have backups of your data. If i get infected, I wipe and nuke from orbit anyway, I don’t trust that antivirus will remove everything.

  • One_Dollar_Payout@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    If you are on Windows, you already have a good antivirus program built in, and that is Windows Defender. Other than that, be sure to install uBlock Origin extension in your preferred browser - it not only eliminates ads, but also annoying pop-ups, embeds, trackers, malware sites and other annoying things on the internet. When you want to download something, and you’re not sure if it’s safe, scan the download link with VirusTotal.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    you don’t need antivirus with linux.

    there are next to no linux viruses. there is a bit of malware, but mostly targeted at servers. just don’t excessively download and execute random stuff. and don’t type things like “rm -rf /” into your console, if people tell you to. use your package manager where you can.

    (most linux antivirus is used in like email-servers to scan mail before sending them out, so the windows clients don’t get infected. antivirus on linux is seldomly/never(?) used to protect the linux itself.)

      • DarkTides@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        And if you don’t understand it and you do find yourself needing to do some terminal stuff chatgpt can be helpful breaking down what is going on.

  • nxfsi@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In my opinion windows defender is worse than not using an antivirus at all because of the false sense of security. I’m sure that the guy who got his Bitcoin stolen from downloading fake OBS software has windows defender enabled like everybody else.

    I’m not suggesting you go out of your way to disable defender, but exercise common sense and good security practices instead of relying on any antivirus. Download software from package managers (winget, scoop, chocolatey) instead of from Google and always read the megathread for getting “other stuff”. Install an adblocker on your browser and block as much 3rd party and Javashit as is practical. Don’t use the administrator account as your main account. Sandbox your programs if you’re feeling extra paranoid. Always back up everything important somewhere else. Use TRON script (r/tronscript) to clean up your computer in case you get infected.

    However always keep in mind no strategy is 100% safe, but a little common sense goes a long way.

    • AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      If we’re talking about common sense, then admitting to getting your bitcoin stolen by downloading fake OBS software probably isn’t the way to start off the comment. That’s not Windows Defender’s fault, that one was all on you, and can happen with most anti-virus if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing.

  • idkman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Windows defender is more than enough. On Linux, you don’t need one, but there’s clamAV, which scan for windows viruses.

    • zxo@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      There are still viruses for Linux to watch out for, but they are much rarer to come by, so I don’t have an antivirus on my Linux machine.

        • zxo@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Rootkits still can exist for Linux, but because there are more Windows users and thus more to be gained from a Windows virus of any sort, it would be pretty hard to find a rootkit for Linux.