People (rightly) shit on Windows but Defender, despite constantly flagging my windows activator as malware, is the best antivirus that’s ever happened. If that fails (occasionally I have a family member who needs help) the amazing Malwarebytes takes care of it with one scan.

If that fails, whatever—reformat. Reformat never fails hahaha.

I haven’t got a virus once in my life, and I’m old. But like you, I stick to trusted sources. Even back on Kazaa, I made sure I’m not running an exe or bat and I was totally fine. The worst thing that happened to me was fucking with the mean clock in AOHELL TOOLZ too much and it put like a thousand text files title FUCK YOU in windows folder, circa windows XP. Luckily deleted them before my dad found out. Took FOREVER with a 400MHz Celeron.

At least it didn’t infect me with CIH, like it threatened (it told me the previous clock did that if you clicked it too much.)

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just FYI, these days even a format can fail. Some things manage to get into your actual bios, or infect your drive firmware.

Extremely rare, but still very much possible.

[–] FierySpectre@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Possible, but nobody is wasting such a good exploit on average consumer PC's.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You’d be surprised, these have already been found in the wild. They aren’t 0-days or anything, so they aren’t exactly secret or worth much. No more than any other cluster of code anyway.