That buddy who said I didn't need antivirus was dead wrong

My friend Mark kept telling me Windows Defender was all I needed and those third party programs were just scams. I believed him for about 6 months until last Tuesday when I clicked a link in an email that looked like it was from my bank. Within 2 hours my whole desktop was locked with a ransomware message demanding $400 in Bitcoin. Cost me $150 to have a tech shop clean it out and I lost all my photos from my kid's birthday. Has anyone else had a friend give them bad security advice that backfired hard?

3 comments

3 Comments

rose_cooper1mo ago

Mark from IT told me the exact same thing. Windows Defender is enough he said. I had him build my gaming PC too. Three months in I got a fake Adobe update popup. Wiped my whole SSD before I could even react. Cost me $200 in data recovery and I lost my tax documents. Never listening to those "it's fine" guys again.

tessa_clark741mo ago

Oh man, "Wiped my whole SSD before I could even react" is exactly the kind of nightmare that keeps me up at night. But here's what I'm wondering - did you have any sort of backup running at all? Like even just a cheap external hard drive you plug in once a week? Because I've been burned twice now, first with a crypto locker that got my family photos and then with a drive failure that ate my music collection. I finally caved and got Backblaze after the second time, but I still don't trust any setup that relies on just one layer of protection. Mark from IT might know his way around building a PC but if he's telling people Windows Defender is bulletproof then he's living in a fantasy land where fake updates don't exist.

dakota_nelson431mo ago

Mark told me my backup plan was "fine" too. Never felt safer.