AiProtection and Security Suites (Norton, Bitdefender, etc.)

[muckle_dabuckle]

I recently dropped Norton for Bitdefender Total Security after ten years because I wanted to try something new (I know the cool thing to do now is use Malwarebytes and Windows Defender). I also have an 86u with all of the AiProtection features turned on. A lot of the features seem to be redundant between the Bitdefender features and AiProtection. I turned off secure browsing in Bitdefender because Trend Micro already "monitors" my Web traffic through AiProtection and I thought having two services do the same thing may slow my Internet speeds down. I did notice Bitdefender blocked a phishing site that AiProtection missed before I turned secure browsing off.

Does anyone have any recommendations for what features to turn on/off between AiProtection and security suites?

 

[Dirk_Diggler]

I recently dropped Norton for Bitdefender Total Security after ten years because I wanted to try something new (I know the cool thing to do now is use Malwarebytes and Windows Defender). I also have an 86u with all of the AiProtection features turned on. A lot of the features seem to be redundant between the Bitdefender features and AiProtection. I turned off secure browsing in Bitdefender because Trend Micro already "monitors" my Web traffic through AiProtection and I thought having two services do the same thing may slow my Internet speeds down. I did notice Bitdefender blocked a phishing site that AiProtection missed before I turned secure browsing off.

Does anyone have any recommendations for what features to turn on/off between AiProtection and security suites?

If you have slow connection or older computer you may see some slowest. I use AiProtection and ESET Security and I have not really noticed any slowest. I have seen ESET Security block some pages the AiProtection didn't. For me I like having the double protection. As always YMMV.

 

[muckle_dabuckle]

I have seen ESET Security block some pages the AiProtection didn't. For me I like having the double protection. As always YMMV.

Good point about the double protection. I have a two-year-old computer that I built myself that has pretty decent specs and good Internet speeds. I did notice some slowdown when I had all of Bitdefender's secure browsing features turned on, but I think it was the "search defender" feature that ranks the safety of your Web searches. I'll have to experiment some more (right now I have a bunch of features turned off that I know AiProtection handles). It's nice that Bitdefender has so many options you can turn on/off.

There are also privacy considerations to think of. I don't remember how AiProtection scans your e-mails. Bitdefender has the feature where you can block e-mails in Cyrillic and Asian characters or just scan incoming e-mails. Not sure I want two companies scanning my e-mails. It may be good to have double protection though. Decisions...

 

[Dirk_Diggler]

Good point about the double protection. I have a two-year-old computer that I built myself that has pretty decent specs and good Internet speeds. I did notice some slowdown when I had all of Bitdefender's secure browsing features turned on, but I think it was the "search defender" feature that ranks the safety of your Web searches. I'll have to experiment some more (right now I have a bunch of features turned off that I know AiProtection handles). It's nice that Bitdefender has so many options you can turn on/off.

There are also privacy considerations to think of. I don't remember how AiProtection scans your e-mails. Bitdefender has the feature where you can block e-mails in Cyrillic and Asian characters or just scan incoming e-mails. Not sure I want two companies scanning my e-mails. It may be good to have double protection though. Decisions...

I know that's the tough part. I haven't looked at Bitdefender's email scanner, does it have a folder in your mailbox that shows what emails have been blocked? I would hate to have a legit email get blocked and not know about.

 

[muckle_dabuckle]

I haven't looked at Bitdefender's email scanner, does it have a folder in your mailbox that shows what emails have been blocked? I would hate to have a legit email get blocked and not know about.

I'm not 100% sure. There is a Bitdefender tab in Outlook by default where you have the option of two rules: move message to deleted items and mark spam as read. So it seems to me that Bitdefender automatically deletes e-mails it considers spam and sends them to the deleted items folder, but you can prevent that by turning the feature off (obviously) or adding trusted e-mail addresses to a list (you can add e-mail addresses to a list as either "spam" or "friends"). I swear I saw a setting where you could have only incoming e-mails scanned or only outgoing e-mails scanned or both....can't find it now. I also wonder if Bitdefender no longer scans e-mails from addresses in the friends list. Not clear.