Bitcoin Forum

Recently bought myself both Malwarebytes and Bitdefender on a single recommendation. But i am fairly uncertain how these really compare to the many others out there. Wanted to get some recommendations from people in the know.

In the last year i've got increasingly into Bitcoin and crypto so obviously, this issue has become more important to me.

Finally have heard the view that all anti-malware software is modern day snake oil, and all one needs is updated current windows - Any truth to this?

You should first educate yourself about computer threads in order to be the first antimalware of your computer.
Second to that, if you haven't bougth different production, i would have told you to chose Kaspersky Internet security. I've used 4 commercial products and Kaspersky has the best detection rate with least false positives.
Depending on your online activities you may also need a firewall.
My last word is, you should not install software from unknonw sources. Do not open attachement on mails from unknonw or suspicious address. Also open files from torrents sites in a virtual machine or dedicated computer.

Use linux/Ubuntu or just learn to be careful (which you should be doing with or without anti-viruses). Don't be visiting dodgy websites where malware is rife and don't be downloading things from random websites or emails. If you do that it's very unlikely you'll get a virus but any antivirus isn't 100% foolproof. I would also use a separate computer to deal with any substantial amounts of bitcoin. You can buy computers very cheaply these days or just use a raspberry pi or something similar.

Comodo provides free Anti-Malware software automatically detects and destroys the many different types of malware.

Even if you're the most careful PC user out there, malware can find a way to download itself onto the computer. A seemingly innocent email from a friend could in fact be a stealth method of exploiting security features. What appears to be a favorite website could in fact be an imposter, foisting its own malware on unsuspecting visitors. There are literally hundreds of ways in which personal information and entire operating system can be hijacked.

The way anti virus systems work is that they are searching your computer in their database for programs which are named similar or using similar processes. It's basically a database which is constantly scanning your computer to find .exe and applications which use processes that they have stored on the database. This is why anti virus systems can bring up false positives easily.

You've probably got a warning from a program which you know is safe. But the software is getting flagged either because of it's name or it uses a similar process to a malicious software that is on it's database. In fact anti virus software are highly ineffective against new malware.

It only knows how to protect you against malware which is in it's database. Almost all modern anti virus programs likely have the exact same database and will add to it once they have found new malware. There are other ways they detect issues with your pc but looking at disk usage and a variety of other things. But the main thing they do is database lookup. If you have a good enough head on you and you only download from reputable sources and use a checksum whenever possible you shouldn't have to much of an issue.

Linux just safe guards you a little more due to it not being targeted and a little harder for a malicious program to get access everywhere it needs to which is a lot easier on a windows machine.

If you want to have a little safeguard to prevent you from slipping time to time then a free program should be enough. I used to use microsofts built in anti virus combined with the free version of malwarebytes. Now days I'm just more careful and trust in my ability to judge if I should be downloading stuff or not.

No anti virus is going to be better than your brain. You can and some people do protect your computer without ever installing a anti virus program and to be honest most of them are ridiculously over priced for what they actually do.

For serious task buy MacBook, MacOs don't need antivirus (but still require soft updates) and will be safer for money movements then windows. Anyway always keep soft updated (like Java/Flash and so on, that are the main doors to any system)

It doesn't matter what kind of laptop/desktop you have as long as you fully reboot your computer once every two/three months it will make a big difference even if you couldn't care less about the fact streaming from unknown website while watching something it is a great way to stay away from malicious intent from your computer.

for a laptop/computer to become as clean as possible just install what is necessary drivers not the one you found on a blog post stating it can greatly help the performance of your gadgets.

Pfft.

What do you mean by "fully reboot" the computer? Reinstalling the operating system? This is not effective and efficient from my pov, and at the same time doesn't fully answer what OP wanted to know about how to protect their computer while he/she uses it for crypto-related things.

I second the opinion to use Linux and having a separated computer. This, in my opinion, helps to prevent somebody steals your private key. No need to buy anti-malware software.

Some malware is very hard or impossible to remove with our traditional anti-virus programs, so the second layer protection is worth having. I use SpyHunter for almost a year and it has helped me a number of times when neither Norton nor Windows antiviruses could help.

Windows has it's own anti virus called Windows defender. It does the job pretty well. Before it I didn't really use anti viruses, just used common sense when surfing the internet.