Free antivirus programs have been installed by default on Windows for a long time, but you may not need to install them separately in the future.
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Cybersecurity experts believe that Bitdefender, despite officially saying it was discontinuing its popular free antivirus product to focus on cross-platform protection, may have been forced to do so by factors affecting other vendors as well.
"The malware problem has become too big and too expensive to manage for a free product. More than a million new malicious programs appear every month. Analyzing and implementing detection is extremely expensive in terms of money and effort," Dr. Vesselin Vladimirov Bontchev, an antivirus and malware specialist at the National Laboratory of Computational Virology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, told Lifewire via Twitter.
Dr. Bontchev believes that a supplier’s other profitable products will usually offset the cost of maintaining free products. But this arrangement can only work to a certain extent, and when costs rise too much, maintaining the free product is no longer sustainable from a business perspective.
