 Over the last few years, there's been a, let's call it a trend among computer enthusiasts to no longer use protection. And I've definitely changed my habits as well. And for every day, that might seem okay, but you get outside your comfort zone every now and then, you know? You go someplace you've never been before, or someone you don't know messes with some place that you used to be comfortable in, and before you know it, you're lost and alone, and everybody wants your bits. Which is why Bitdefender reached out to sponsor this video about their security software and the role that Security Solutions play in 2018. In fact, they're so confident about their role that they've got something planned for the end of this video. Spoiler alert, it's a go- Intro music Okay, so first things first, um, why Bitdefender? I'm pretty sure that I'm on the record saying that I don't use antivirus software on my personal machine anymore. I mean, it's not that I don't care about my security, I do use security software here at work, we've got a site-wide license, and I do use it on relatives and friends machines, it's just that for myself, I found that common sense and reasonable precautions are good for most things, and then what I'll do is I'll just roll out a sacrificial virtual machine when I need to do something a little sketchy, like let's say I need an ISO for an old version of Windows or something. Although that is horribly inconvenient for most people, and Anthony, who actually worked on writing this video, has seen plenty of cocky folks like me taking down a peg at his old PC repair job where they recommended Bitdefender, and on that subject, the channel you're watching right now was actually hijacked when I clicked on something I shouldn't have, got a keylogger, and they took away the account, that happened probably about six or seven years ago. So this is one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do types of things. Anyway, hot-off winning product of the year and consistently being at the top for security, Bitdefender came to us with a challenge. Break our protection. Clearly they don't know who they're dealing with. But before we go about testing that, let's break down some of those reasonable precautions that you and you and everyone you know should be implementing, regardless to prevent your data from getting lost via an infection or worse. First of all, keep local backups, and RAID is not a backup, of all critical data. This lets you get backup and running more quickly in the case of a drive crash, or if you get hit by ransomware, which, yes, is still going strong, not to mention is getting more sophisticated all the time. As it happens, Bitdefender can actually protect important folders wholesale, and behaviorally protects everything else against even zero days that haven't been patched yet. And this is before the malware has a chance to encrypt anything. So this at minimum saves you from having to restore from your backups, and at worst, having to pay a ransom to maybe, if they actually go through with their word, I mean, remember, these are not the most up-and-up folks to maybe get your college thesis or your vacation photos back. None of that, though, will save you if the building is on fire, so you should also keep an off-site backup. These days, cloud storage services dominate this space, but you can also accomplish this by just keeping a backup drive in a separate building, like a friend's or your parents' house. Now, back to that common sense theory of personal cybersecurity. That essentially boils down to three important points. One, keep everything up to date. At minimum, stay on top of your security updates. Number two, keep your stock protection enabled. This acts as a better-than-nothing last line of defense once something is on your PC, which brings us to three, don't download stupid stuff. But, I mean, stupid's not really a fair word for it, because as easy or common sense as some of these things might be for you, it's not necessarily common sense to people who don't live and breathe tech every day, and furthermore, it's not that uncommon for popular websites to become targets of poisoning attempts by hackers. And we've actually had, additionally, some very convincing phishing scams roll into our inboxes that appeared to be internal mail from other people who work here. And these are both things that Bitdefender offers proactive protection against. I mean, I'm sure that you guys all know someone, you know who they are, who downloads anything with a shiny button. So why don't we go ahead and watch the rest of this video from that perspective? So Anthony has provided me with a handy-dandy list of skeezy sites that I can visit, and I've got a virtual machine that is protected by Bitdefender up here. My mandate is to go to all of these sites, follow any link that crosses my path, and click on basically every ad. Also, I'll be installing some apps just clicking next through the installers without checking to see what they're putting on my system. If my sister's watching, basically I'm channeling you. All right, so right now we're not in autopilot, so it's going to give me notifications for pretty much everything that happens. This is total security, so this is their top-of-the-line anti-bad stuff protection. It's been a long time since I've gone to a sketchy site. What the heck is this? Steve Mike fireforce.info. Weird. Yeah, no, I already know that's working. Oh, I wonder if that one's down. dvsa-dream.com. To be very clear, we're not recommending you go any of these places. Bitdefender blocked this page. Oh, so is it actually blocking content from the page too? It could be, yeah. Huh, all right. Larodemas. How are these not loading? So even my browser doesn't like this one. You know what? Why was I using Chrome in the first place? Huh. Anthony, none of these pages are working. Wait, oh, it's a sketchy redirect. Maybe these are some friends that I can talk to. Oh, I won because there's no real domain. Oh, better pixelate that. Anthony, were you browsing these sites at work? I gotta find some stuff to download here. That sounds pretty sketchy. Is this one down too? skewawill.com. Visit the site. Oh, these sites are so slow. All right, we found some of them that are still up. So I think I would like some free video game. What is wen.com? Yeah, our Zoom driver update. That sounds pretty good. Meanwhile, let's go to cinehee.com. This looks perfectly legitimate. It's just running off YouTube. Activate your free account. 256-bit SSL encryption. You are safe. I don't have like a fake credit card to give them. Yeah, sure. Here we go. 50 euros a month. Yeah, no. Driversupport.exe. That seems good. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. With active optimization. Okay, well, while that's running, let's find some other stuff. Here's an ad for Adobe. This looks like it may actually be a real thing. Is Torch bad? It's adware. It's adware. Okay. What do I care who the publisher is? Yes. The ultimate best sites to watch free movies. Okay, so that game just didn't seem to actually do anything. Active optimization. Do I have to actually buy something to get infected by this? Oh my God. We need something. A registry optimizer. Quick, easy, and safe. Start scan. 24 items repaired. What does that even mean? Nothing. Free make video converter. Yes, install all the things. Google docs for dummies. These aren't even downloads. These are just like stupid clickbait lists. Okay, so this is just junkware. Oh, hey, hey. Something finally tried to screw us. Free make video downloader tried to make a change to a file in a protected folder and was blocked. And the program crashed. So we found out why it seemed like it was impossible to infect the computer. We went into the notifications for Bitdefender and it's blocking the sites with malware on them. And in the warnings tab, we've got the junk that we just installed. So I guess if something falls into the phishing, fraud, or malware category, then it's insta-blocked. And if it's potentially unwanted and not malicious, it just warns you about it. Okay. No, maybe I'll just turn it off for a little bit. Is there a way to turn it off? Here we go. All right. All right. Advanced threat defense. Off, off, off, off. Okay. Come on. Yes, we are providing all the administrative access. You need permit. No threat moved to quarantine. How did it do that? How did it do that? I want to get jiggy with some infected pages here. I'm trying so hard to install garbage. Detected threat is being disaffected. Even if I try and turn it off, it's still working. So overall, we found this exercise both frustrating, but then also reassuring because initially, I thought it was basically impossible to infect a computer these days. No matter what kind of websites we tried to go to or what we tried to click on, it had been quietly keeping us from actually getting infected with anything. They've got a couple of different modes. So they've got both a game mode and a movie mode, which you can check out in the dashboard. And they have been found consistently to have among the best detection rates in the industry according to AV comparatives and AV test. So there you go, guys. Most of us, like me and Anthony and you, the one who's watching this, are not going to do this kind of thing on a daily basis. Although, you know, probably more often than we might like to admit, we do end up on somewhat sketchy websites. But we all know someone who does frequent free TV sites or, you know, registry repair application sites and does fall for online scams. And that's where Bitdefender really comes into its own, because you can install it for them and then not have to deal with the fallout, you know, three or six months down the line. And speaking of six months, as luck would have it, exclusively for our viewers, Bitdefender is giving away a six month subscription for new users. So give it a try. And if you're the family tech support guru, maybe don't install it on your own PC necessarily. Install it on a loved one's computer, set it on autopilot, and then reduce the number of support calls that you have to deal with. So thanks for watching, guys. If you just liked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured. That is of course Bitdefender at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.