Lions, Tigers, and Malware – Oh! My.

Windows 10 Home comes with a built in Anti-Virus software called Windows Security. It does a good job of categorizing security concerns
into 7 unique categories:
1. Virus and Threat Protection, where you can place your folder systems into a protected state. This Anti-Virus software
also have a threat scanner. It even recently picked up the installer for The NiceHash Crypto Miner. (I’ll be covering that program at a later point!)
2. Account Protection, to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your desktop through: facial recognition, fingerprinting, pins, a
physical security key, passwords, and picture passwords! Talk about defense in depth.
3. Firewall and Network Protection, allows a brief over-view of the current state of the machines built in firewalls. Where
inbound connections that are NOT allowed are blocked, and outbound connections that ARE allowed pass.
4. Application and browser control, helps to provide safe browsing, and many different exploits. (The browsing protection appears to be limited to Edge users.)
5. Device security, with – core isolation, the TPM module, and secure boot features.
6. Device performance and health, to give a brief overview of the machines – storage, battery, application, and Windows service performance.
7. Family options, in order to protect against explicit websites (see our other solution – link), establish screen time habits,
generate an activity report, and control buying.

In comparison, and perhaps unnecessarily, Avast Anti-Virus– offers….a powerful virus scanner to find malware that slips in, as well as
to check for unsafe configurations, and passwords. The Anti-virus detects and block viruses, malware, spyware, ransomware, and phishing.
A Wi-Fi inspector to detect others on your network. One additional free feature is the “online security” browser extension.
Other than the Wi-Fi inspector, the free software doesn’t appear to add any additional features – and additionally, I’m blaming an Avast update
that got pushed back in 2020 for causing my laptop to crash. After that update to the program, I lost lots of data that I had been gathering for several years…. though maybe not forever. While it is not possible at this point of my technical knowledge to prove this, but it was the last software I interfaced with PRIOR to the crash – maybe they can help me recover the data to prove otherwise?

One strong positive for is the blog and community form, that – and the “threat search” portion of the blog particularly are,
in my estimation superior to the huge and often time confusing array of documents on the Microsoft website.

Overall, without paying, both lack many live support options! We also may attempt to review some of the source code in the future to determine what’s really happening on the net!