Table of Contents

Antivirus (AV)

Most of the time you do not need a third-party antivirus! Most people using Windows will be fine using Windows Defender in addition to blocking advertisements in their browsers. GNU/Linux users do not need an antivirus software at all most of the time.

reasons for not using 3rd party AV software

SSL stripping proxies

Some antivirus software installs a web proxy on your system which intercepts every download. While this is effective against malicious software, it can also be exploited when there is a bug in the proxy which enables drive-by downloads.

Articles

Best practices

Help! My AV found malicious software!

You can upload suspicious files to virustotal.com to see the results from other virus scanning engines.

it has "Generic" in its name

The fact that the name contains "Generic" means the AV didn't detect anything, it just means it found some programming patterns in there that it also found in viruses.