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.
On 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.
I'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.
Yes, 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.
What, 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.
Even 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.
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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 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.
On 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.
I'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.
Yes, 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.
cryptolocker, winxp to win8, it's a problem
Cryptolocker requires the user to run the executable. Users doing that are going to get infected regardless of OS.
What, 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.
Even 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.
But that would be a firewall and not an antivirus software.