I was looking for help in choosing an anti-virus program for my windows PC.
I want to make sure it doesn’t interfere with VPN or stop VPN programs from working properly or having a DNS leak.
Any suggestions? Favourites?
Antivirus programs really shouldn’t interact with a VPN at all. Any of them would probably be good.
What you would really be worried about would be the program identifying itself to the manufacturers’ servers when you were on the VPN, and again when you were off the VPN, thus linking your identities.
Kaspersky is by far the best on the market, along with BitDefender, which also uses the same engine. Check out how it does every month and year here.
Check here.. They do monthly test to determine what’s best. There are some notable options that they don’t test though (like MalwareBytes).
What firewall you use shouldn’t be an issue for your VPN. Although if you do want a failsafe for your VPN then I highly suggest you implement this through a firewall. In which case you need a firewall that allows you to set different rules for each network adaptor. So keep that in mind.
I use webroot but mostly because its convenient and covers my mac’s and all of my PC’s. No issues with using it with VPN software.
To protect against DNS leak if using OPENVPN
Otherwise you have to rely on your VPN providers software to protect you against DNS LEAK or you can do it yourself manually each time (see bottom of the page in the link above)
As others have said AV should not interfere with the VPN at all but i do know some AV and Anti Malware applications have features that actually scan HTTP traffic and block any connections/downloads that appear malicious but that is all standard and normal.
Edit: Good luck OP , as for a great AV i would personally recommend Eset NOD32 then Kaspersky then Bitdefender , in comparison to all nod32 is extremely lightweight on the system and has stronger self protection features to prevent it from being disabled as well as being a reputable and trusted antivirus software with a great detection rate and less false positives.
So I’m not sure why it happened but Kaspersky and Bit Defender both interrupted my VPN service. The service was still working but dnsleaktest showed 2 servers with their usage.
My VPN provider was unable to help. Only recommended adding certain files to the exception list but it did not help.
My computer came preloaded with McAfee and that didn’t have any problems with the VPN, but the others did for some reason.
I have bitdefender it doesn’t cause any of these issues for me.
Interesting. I have no problems with Bit Defender regarding VPN connections and I am using IVPN that has a client that prevents DNS leaks.
But Kapersky is another matter. It took me months to figure out that no vpn seems to work while Kapersky is installed. I had tried Expressvpn and PIA using Openvpn, SSTP and L2TP before I checked various forums and found this out. There may be a vpn that does work with Kapersky but you’d have to go through each one by one.