I am becoming increasingly annoyed by the amount of misinformation being spread by some people, especially those supposed to be specialists in their field. The internet, coupled with the prominence some of these people have among their subscribers or viewers, makes such misinformation sometimes downright dangerous.

Now do not get me wrong - I am the first one to admit I do not possess the skills to factually criticize all knowledge domains. But there are some domains for which I do have those skills. I have unfortunately not made a list of all the instances of false facts that pushed my buttons, but I will try and post an entry under the category Post Truth as and when I do come across them.

For this first entry, the false fact is trivial to explain. But first, review this video from Techquickie by Linus Sebastian.

Specifically, note the part where Linus says:

No, the trick is to run an active anti virus scanner that serves as a catch all, and have an on demand anti-malware program that you can run full scans with periodically or when you notice a change in your computer's performance.

He is right that it is not clever to run multiple anti virus applications with real time scanners concurrently - that will slow down your PC. And yes, running an anti virus application AND anti malware realtime scanners will slow down your PC, but the anti malware program he refers to, Malwarebytes, was designed to run WITH an anti virus program, both with real time scanning enabled.

By following Linus' suggestion, you would be defeating the whole point of using an anti malware application - to PREVENT infection. Sure, anti malware is good to remove malware and other unwanted software once it is on your PC, but one of the biggest reasons to run anti malware is to prevent infections of malware, especially a "new" class of malware called Ransomware. Most traditional anti virus applications are too slow to pick up on exploits such as WannaCry, CryptoLocker, Petya etc. If your anti malware application is configured as per Linus' recommendation above, all your data would have been encrypted and lost forever (assuming no backups) as it only takes minutes / hours to do so once infected, and the anti malware tool will only be able to remove the malware, but the data is still lost.

This is a case where Linus is very wrong, and you should always triple check any advice you get from anyone - prominent or not.