Currently, my anti-virus software of choice is Bitdefender.
There's a file on a Windows computer called the "hosts file", that most people have no need to change. It lives at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. (Linux-based systems have a hosts file too, at /etc/hosts.) In fact, unless you have a need to change it, and know what you're doing, leave well alone.
There are times you may want to edit it though. It allows you to override the DNS system for individual domains, and sometimes this is exactly what you want to do. (Maybe your run a website that has moved to a new server, but the new IP address is yet to propagate, for example).
DNS is the phone book of the internet: It turns the web address you enter in your browser into a numeric address that the browser can actually find. So malicious actors would love to be able to change that phone book. If they managed, you could type the website for your bank into the browser, and a completely different website would load. So good anti-virus software will monitor the hosts file, to make sure nothing has changed that shouldn't have done.
Out of the box, Bitdefender does this, and will revert any changes that get made. It simply inserts a '#' character in front of any added lines, which comments out the entry. That protects your computer, but is a nuisance if you've intentionally changed it.
There are various help files on the internet telling you how to stop this. You're told to go to General Settings > Advanced, and untick the box that monitors your host file.
However that is no longer where that setting is found. Instead, you go to the Protection tab, and then click "Open" to configure the vulnerability protection settings.
Choose the "Settings" tab at the top, and you'll see an option to "Scan hosts file". This is enabled by default. If you want to make changes to the hosts file, without Bitdefender reverting them, unselect it as shown in the screenshot below.
Add new comment