I Turned Off All Antivirus Protection for a Week. Here's What I Learned

I've been running Bitdefender and Windows Security on my machines for a while now. Between the two of them, I've never had a serious infection or compromised account. They run in the background, I update them and I don't think about them much more than that.

But that's a problem. When you stop thinking about your own security and hand it off entirely to software, you stop developing important instincts. The software becomes a substitute for judgement rather than a supplement to it, and if it ever goes away, you're left with habits you never build.

So, to see how much heavy lifting the software was doing, I turned off both Bitdefender and Windows Security for a week and went off of the security instincts I'd built up over years of practicing cybersecurity best practicesand just being online in general. By the end of the week, I had a...

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