Windows 11

1492 wrote:
Bill, if you are connecting to the Internet with WIN7, you're taking a risk of using any legacy OS with no security patching moving forward. Most all who caught the WannaCry crypto ransomeware got it from unpatched WIN 7 machines. Hope you're not accessing any financial accounts?

Don't think anti-malware software can protect you. It just takes a cyber criminal to exploit a vulnerability in OS allowing elevated privileges to disable security on your system. They can then do pretty much anything they want.

I HAVE seen "fully patched" and "up to date" PCs behind very heavily configured firewalls fall victim to virus/malware just as easily or even easier than fresh baremetal install of OS with zero patches.

Wannacry and lots of other ransomware/malware/virus is typically initially delivered via emails, email attachments or emails with links embeded that often look like an official email from someone you know.. Folks blindly open, click the attachments or links and bam it is launched.. Once launched if your PC is a member of a IT domain it will then attempt to move through that network.

Basically in a nutshell, the best "security" is not really trying to steel armor island your PC. It is more about being suspicious of emails and not to blindly trust everything. Investigate, check the actual email address before opening or clicking on it, often times the email will show your friends or known business name "alias" but if you look closer the actual email address is different..

Don't click the links in any email when it comes to any email purporting an account issue (your account will be locked if you don't respond type of thing), a shipping issue (there has been an error with your shipment type of thing that you didn't order), those links can take you to spoofed websites which could initiate installing a virus, malware, ransomware and/or make you divulge personal information ("Phishing").

Instead of clicking on links in any email to get to a website, go directly to the website on your own from your browser and not from the email link.

On edit..

Wanted to also add, that there are some very practical and effective ways to harden your PC from unwanted stuff.

Always use a adblocker, I use AdBlockPlus, works a treat on the third party inline ads (typically blue text with double underlines) which if you hover over will popup an ad.. Another way to harden your PC is to run NoScript in your browser.. NoScript blocks JavaScripts from running, JavaScripts have full administrative access to your PC making all of those Windows updates pretty much a useless affair.

However blocking JavaScripts from running will break most websites so you have to one by one enable them to get the website to work..