I use McAfee.I personally don’t trust the free software
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McAfee has fairly moderate performance outcomes in many of the AV testing results but again each person has a preference and one AV is better than none but also then requires a user not to be lulled into a false sense of security about their protection. The best performer over time has been Kaspersky but some are moving away from it because of it’s Russian heritage. Same for other Eastern European products such as AVG, or Bitdefender. Another product that might also be worth a look if looking in the paid for section of choices is Webroot (https://www.webroot.com/au/en/home/products/compare) who are a US company.
Most of the free products use exactly the same AV engines as the paid for versions but are less packed with features eg single daily updates, they may have some advertising of the paid products, they may not carry out other checks other than vanilla AV. When you say you don’t trust free is it because you feel because it is free it’s AV performance is hobbled or because of some other reason/s? I would appreciate knowing why you don’t trust them in a bit more depth so myself and others looking at choices can understand the reasons why or why not to use them. It is also very OK if you don’t want to expand your reasons.
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The only surprising thing is the admission - but it isn’t an admission because there is nothing to see here … apparently …
Of course it is “safe to use”, they’ve reviewed the code AND reverse engineered the product - I guess they’ve read Ken Thompson’s 1984 Turing Award Lecture …
For those not familiar with some of these more recent ‘situations’, there’s a couple of companies who became the focus of attention from the so-called ‘nation state actor’: Microsoft, FireEye and CrowdStrike.
“Sell, Mortimer, Sell!!” 
Hmm. Does anyone remember the Sony CD copy protection rootkit scandal of 2005?
Did they get burnt after maintaining that it was all just innocent software protecting their product from illegal copying. Some AV / malware detection products use “rootkit” methods to protect themselves against other products.
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No, but what a disgusting act.
BitDefender and Malwarebytes do not coexist happily in my experience. Also keep in mind that BitDefender (and probably most other third party AV software) installs its own security key so it can read all of your traffic.
You bet - while not directly affected, I am still boycotting Sony products.
I have been running BitDefender Free and Malwarebytes Premium for a few years without problem. Are there reports indicating the combination fails to ‘protect’? If you refer to BitDefender refusing to install w/Malewarebytes, that was resolved by a switch in MWB to avoid it ‘checking in’ as an AV.
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I used them both a few years ago, and had problems. Can’t remember the details off-hand.
Without suggesting you may not have had other issues with the two side by side, and BitDefender was infamous for refusing to install with any other AV product because they would often interfere with each other. The other had to be uninstalled, BitDefender installed, and the other then reinstalled. An underlying issue was multiple AVs tended to reduce efficacy not improve it as was reported by various labs. But MWB is not a typical AV, it is antimalware, noting most of the AV products are incorporating antimalware components in recent releases, some that are more or less effective.
The MBW switch removes MWB from the Windows security registry so BitDefender does not ‘see’ it during install and happily installs whether MWB is installed or not, these days.
Not suggesting you should play with it, but for other readers who might have been put off by your comment, who might otherwise have been interested in BitDefender and MWB running together, the problems of yore seem to have stayed in yore.
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