When my mom had cancer, I swear every relative and distant acquaintance came out of the woodwork trying to sell some kind of nonsense. It was already a devastating time, but on top of that it was insulting being forced to hear about all these delusional snake oil cures and conspiracy theories.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet - have a good backup solution. If there isn’t anything on your computer that can’t be restored, then you’re not going to feel as much pressure to protect things.

Of course there’s crypto miners, identity theft, botnet stuff, all sorts of things that run undetected and don’t simply render your computer unusable. But if you’re absolutely sure you’re not losing anything, then “nuke it from orbit” becomes a more paletteable solution for virus removal. A hassle for sure, but format and start over again becomes an option that results in no loss other than the pain of having to reinstall everything.

Seems to me there’s a concentrated effort to convince the public that there’s outrage.

Yeah even as a technician that’s one I run on the off chance that it actually does something.

Which, sometimes it does, just often enough that I wouldn’t call it useless.