Bitdefender Antivirus Free - English GUI

Well I downloaded and updated BD again and turned off the Special Offers and Recommendations in settings. No sooner than I opened Chrome I got the same warning about the Facebook data leak. Clicking that "Protect Yourself" button took me to a page in BD Central where I can purchase BD Identity Protection. I am going to give it a little more effort and time and see what happens. It could be that BD needs to see a computer restart for the Special Offers and Recommendations settings to take effect. I will try that and see how it goes.

Jimmy

 

Cough Norton cough cough.

 

Tried it again, no joy. The same Facebook warning came back. I checked BD settings and the one notification setting had turned back on, I know for sure I had turned it off and I was running BD as an admin when I did it. I turned it off again and restarted and for some reason my laptop was running very slow, and BD opened Edge for logging in to BD Central, when my default browser is Chrome. I removed BD again and went back to WD and Configuredefender. Maybe I will try BD again some time, it does offer great protection and I would like for it to work but for now I don't have the time to keep fiddling with it.

Jimmy

 

Oh yeah. Kaspersky does some of it as well.

 

You can turn most of the advertising off in Kaspersky though can't you?

You can disable Special Offer Notifications in Norton but that doesn't stop much.

 

You can but I have still had pop ups here and there.

 

Strange i have never seen this pop-up... did you somewhere opt-in for a databreach warning in settings or in BD central ?

 

No, not that I know of. I do have a Facebook account but I don't use it or post much in there now. I got it a long time ago to keep up with my daughter when she was in college. Maybe BD sent that warning because it knows or can see I have that FB account.

Jimmy

 

I reinstalled BD today and I think I found the problem. In the Settings, under the Advanced tab there is a function to "see cyber threat reports". I have switched that one and the Special Offers to off. I will try this and see what happens but I believe that cyber threat setting is what caused the FB warning to show up.

Jimmy

 

Keep us posted @Jimmy9190 By the way your name is showing in the screenshot if you care.

 

Edited, thanks

 

I spoke too soon again. I went back online just a few minutes ago and now BD is throwing me this new warning. Clicking the "Protect Yourself" button takes me to a BD page to buy BD Identity Theft Protection. There have been no changes in my settings, the "see cyber threat warning" is still set to off. Maybe this is something new with BD but I don't want it and am through trying to fix this problem. I am going back to WD or some other AV.

Jimmy

 

These nags may go away in time. Not sure.

Found a manual for it. Maybe there is some info in here.

https://www.bitdefender.com/media/materials/2021/userguides/en_EN/bitdefender_avfree_userguide_en.pdf

 

I don't know what happened with BD on my daily driver laptop. I wanted to do a test, I have another older laptop that still has BD Free on it. I put it on there maybe a month or 6 weeks ago. I keep the older laptop updated same as with this newer one that I use every day. I turned on the older one and let MS do its thing today, updates all went fine. I left the laptop turned on, with BD and Chrome running. It was on all day and BD never popped up any warnings at all, data breach or otherwise. Something must be different with the newer version of BD Free, I have no idea.

Jimmy

 

Here is an update to my small part of this thread...

I think I solved my Bitdefender mystery.

I thought about the problem over the weekend and wanted to give BD one more chance. Yesterday I downloaded it again, turned off the Special Offers and left all other settings including the Recommendation Notifications on default. I wanted to see if BD would throw another warning. BD was quiet all day until tonight when I went to update my Linked In profile. As soon as I opened the Linked In site BD threw the same data breach warning again with a link that says 'Protect Yourself" and another link to read more about the data breach.

BD has a security-related blog, there is a link to it on the BD home page. The data breach pop-ups I received are all related to web sites that have articles on the Bitdefender blog about their respective data breaches. My theory is that I will only get those warning pop-ups if I visit a site that has had a breach and BD has a blog post about it. BD then uses the warning in a mild sales pitch. I also think I never saw the pop-ups on my older laptop when I updated it Saturday because I don't use that laptop very often, and have not used it to visit Facebook, Linked In or any of the sites flagged in the BD blog in a long time.

The BD data breach pop-ups are pretty low-key when compared to the heavier sales/scare tactics I have seen from other AV's. I think the pop-ups are tolerable. Some of the blog stories are actually interesting and I have not seen the same pop-up warning twice at all. As an example, I saw the BD warning about Facebook last week, I read it, closed it and have not seen it since, even though I was on FB a couple of times in the last few days. When/if the pop-ups show up, it's just a click on the X to get rid of it, same as the short BD warning I get when opening a financial website. I can live with that.

The occasional pop-up is not really that bad and is not enough to deter me from using BD Free. Of all the free AV's I think BD Free has the best balance of protection and performance without any bloatware or scanners/cleaners that I just do not need. Other than this very minor and negligible pop-up aspect I am very happy with the new BD Free. It does a great job, has only the modules I need and want to use and browsing and downloading/copying files are faster and smoother than with WD.

Jimmy

 

@Jimmy9190 So, just to be sure, BD is now A-okay..?

 

Yes BD is doing fine. It is super light on my system, I hardly even notice it. Boot time is faster than it was with WD and BD is already up and running by the time my desktop loads. Browsing is really fast and I only have 8 gb RAM. What I really like is BD's detection. I can only test it with the Eicar Test File and the AMTSO phishing test but it detected both right away. BD also kept me off a bad site in a Google search yesterday.

So I was able to turn off the extra browser protection extensions I had been using with WD. I wanted to use only the AV and not overload whichever browser I use with extensions. I did keep Ublock Origin and a Yahoo email ad blocker. If anything else strange was going to happen with BD it probably would have happened by now. I believe this combo and using good online hygiene and common sense will work out fine.

Jimmy

 

Glad to hear it is working out better for you @Jimmy9190

 

Thanks for the info, the GUI really looks good, wish Win Defender looked like this.

Good point, RAM usage is also important to me since I only have 8GB RAM which is barely enough on Win 10 if you want to use multiple apps at the same time. So BD using more RAM than WD is a turn off for me.

Yes exactly, this is a huge reason why I try to stay away from third party AV's.

 

I should add here that I switched to Windows 11 last weekend, it removed BD Free and I am now using the built-in MS Windows Security. I plan to stay with it too, it has been updated and I added the free Malwarebytes Browser Protection extension and Ublock Origin, so between those I think I am getting pretty much the same level of protection as I would with BD or any other AV. So far I have seen no problems at all with Windows 11 or with the MS Security. No browser slowdowns, no problems with copying/moving files, none of that here. I am on a basic laptop with 8 GB Ram and Windows version 21H2 using Edge for my default browser. Now I just need to leave everything this way and resist the temptation to download a third party AV and tinker with its settings.

Jimmy

 

I know what you mean, BD Free does look very attractive but I doubt it will give better protection than WD. On the other hand it does offer anti-exploit as a bonus, I suppose this is a bit more advanced than WD. But it uses more RAM than WD and I'm guessing it will record my browsing activity like most free AV's tend to do.

 

The youtube video's i have seen is that BD free is better against Ransomware than WD ... everyone is free to use what they want...

 

OK, I guess that is kinda cool. But sometimes it seems that results will differ from test to test. I'm currently combining WD with AppCheck Anti-Ransomware and Secure Folders. But I totally forget about another tool named NeuShield Data Sentinel, I will post about it in its own thread.

 

Are you sure that ransomware protection is included in BD Free?

 

Yes its got ransomware protection (same engine & signatures + Behaviour blocker) , but not the Ransom rollback like in Total security.