Antivirus is still needed for Windows

For the first time in well over a decade a Windows device of mine almost succumbed to a virus. I've only recently upgraded to a new laptop and with it transitioning from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

But, this near miss was not due to any error on my side. I didn't click on anything I shouldn't, or from a dodgy download. No, this was from an attachment of a student email. Outlook for desktop by default effectively "pre-downloads" attachments. In normal circumstances this kind of makes sense, but it is a security risk, which almost got me. 

I hadn't even attempted to actually open the attachment, I wasn't even planning to properly look at the email yet because it was a Saturday, but Outlook had other ideas. Thankfully, Windows Defender does actually scan things in real-time and quickly quarantined the attachment before any damage could be done. I then proceeded to rescan the wider folder structure and then got Defender to "remove" (delete) the offended trojan horse.

Unsurprisingly I was not happy about the whole situation, especially considering how recently I got this laptop and I will be relying on it for work heavily over the coming month. 

To double check that the virus had indeed been dealt with I decided to actually make use of the Antivirus that comes with Surfshark. It might not be the best out there, but seems to be rated high enough without any downsides. So why not.

Thankfully that too can back negative for viruses, so things seem to be safe again.

Windows 11 continues to be criticised, and whilst Windows itself did manage to protect itself, I do wonder whether this would have happened had I been on Linux? My time with Windows 11 so far has been fine, but at the back on my mind something about using it niggles away at me.

If it wasn't for my dependency on Office for work (and to a lesser extent research [the writing part]) I could pretty much switch completely to Linux.

For now though I will be relying on the web version of Outlook and relying on online versions of files. If in doubt, I'll probably use my Linux converted Surface device as the canary.