GoKawiilI've been running Bitdefender and Windows Security on my machines for a while now. Between the two of them, I've never had a serious infection or compromised account. They run in the background, I update them and I don't think about them much more than that.
But that's a problem. When you stop thinking about your own security and hand it off entirely to software, you stop developing important instincts. The software becomes a substitute for judgement rather than a supplement to it, and if it ever goes away, you're left with habits you never build.
So, to see how much heavy lifting the software was doing, I turned off both Bitdefender and Windows Security for a week and went off of the security instincts I'd built up over years of practicing cybersecurity best practices and just being online in general. By the end of the week, I had a newfound appreciation for how much work those instincts and the software was doing.
Why I did this, and why you probably shouldn't
Let me be clear: Turning off your antivirus is a bad idea. I know this. My editor knows this. But we made an informed decision to run this experiment anyway
The thing is, there's a question nobody really asks when it comes to cybersecurity: How much of your security online is actually the software, and how much is you? We've been told for years to install the protection, keep it updated and let it do its thing. Fine. But what happens when it isn't running? What happens when it's just you?
That's what I wanted to find out. Not to be reckless, but because I genuinely believe that most people have little idea how much their own behavior matters, and how little they've ever been pushed to really think about it.
I was careful about this. Before I disabled a single thing, I ran the experiment on a secondary device, not my main machine. Everything important was backed up. My browsing stayed within the range of what I'd normally do on any given week -- I wasn't hunting for trouble. The whole point was to see what a normal week looks like without the safety net underneath you.
This was a controlled experiment with a specific purpose, to figure out whether basic security awareness holds up on its own, and what that means for the way we think about protection software.
Here's to one week of paying very close attention.
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