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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago, installing Malwarebytes Anti-Malware dramatically reduced the amount of on-site technical support calls for my well-meaning but too trusting ("I just clicked on it") parents. This was before I was able, with the help of my brother-in-law, to convert them to Apple/Mac.

Is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware still the gold standard for Windows Malware protection? What is the gold standard for Windows virus protection now?

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The gold standard is now Apple MacOs or Linux. I've converted my parents over to Apple systems and no longer have to do any support for them, Apple products "just work". Worth the premium in saved support, in my book.

I use Ubuntu as my main OS, personally.

I would argue that the gold standard is now a chromeOS laptop.

To be honest, Mac OS X do have things like Gatekeeper.

Do you mean MacKeeper? GateKeeper is Apple's software that prevents you from installing non-verifed apps, MacKeeper is (from what I can tell, haven't installed it or looked at the site) spamware.

It never was.

The stuff from Microsoft seems less fraught than the rest.

The stuff from Microsoft unfortunately misses a large amount of malware.

I think they recently are beginning to do Anti-Ransomware, though have no idea how good it is.

How does a ransom ware get activated? Did it always require a user to open a file like an executable (or a word document in unsafe mode) or are they sophisticated enough that simply downloading it will make sure it exploits some vulnerability in the browser or the OS?

The former for the most part.

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