Is MSE better than ESET for Windows 7 in 2025?

[axe0]

Please elaborate on what you mean to say, I'm not sure I fully understand.

 

[whiteindian]

I mean W7 is EOL. ChromeOS is supported until 2026 in this hardware configuration. ChromeOS has a standard Google Play Store, and I can download for example Firefox with extra plugins.

 

[axe0]

Windows 11 < Chrome OS < Windows 10 < Windows 7

In terms of support, it is correct yes in your situation.

 

[Digerati]

Do you mean that both programs are essentially useless?

Neither are "useless". But neither is capable of providing up-to-date protection from the latest threats. This is due to 2 main reasons. (1) The developers have stopped expending resources on these products to ensure any newly discovered bugs are fixed and more importantly, they have stopped developing new definition/signature files for newly discovered malware. And (2), Microsoft stopped support for Windows 7 itself. That means newly discovered vulnerabilities will remain unfixed, unpatched and exposed to the bad guys.

So these products will continue to provide protection from old, known malware and previously patched vulnerabilities. That's not the problem, however. The problem is the bad guys are still searching for new, undiscovered vulnerabilities in Windows 7. And with over 30 million lines of code, surely there are still some. And if (when!) the bad guys find any, they surely will develop malicious code to exploit it.

Nobody likes to retire perfectly good hardware that has served us well for so many years. But the need to do so is just a fact of life - and has been so, particularly for consumer electronics, for decades. We've done it dozens of times with TVs, cordless home phones, cell phones, record players, 8-tracks, cassette players, reel-to-reel, mp3 players, CRT monitors, 4:3 LCD monitors. Even cars. The list goes on and on. As new technologies advance, we retire the old, legacy hardware. Computers are no different.

 

[whiteindian]

Are security issues global, or, for example, when people in one country use outdated operating systems, the risks increase. Do cybercriminals mainly attack where the technological level is the highest?

 

[Corday]

Are security issues global, or, for example, when people in one country use outdated operating systems, the risks increase. Do cybercriminals mainly attack where the technological level is the highest?

The bad guys don't discriminate. They do come from certain countries as reports indicate.

 

[Digerati]

As Corday notes, the bad guys don't discriminate. They don't care and may not even know where you live.

Let me edit your comment for you to make it accurate,

when people in one country use outdated operating systems, the risks increase

 

[whiteindian]

World-first “Cybercrime Index” ranks countries by cybercrime threat level | University of Oxford

Is that index correct?

 

[Digerati]

Is that index correct?

Probably. But understand what it means. The countries listed are not listed because they are being attacked more than others. They are listed because the cybercriminals conducting the attacks do so from within those countries (and sadly, are often sponsored by the governments of those countries).

As the article's sub-title aptly notes (my bold UPPERCASE underline added), the index...

...identifies the globe’s key cybercrime hotspots by ranking the most significant SOURCES of cybercrime at a national level.