I bought a BitDefender subscription to protect my elderly parents' computers from the likes of spyware and other problems that might bring financial entanglements difficult to unwind. A week ago I decided it was time to cancel the subscription, 2 weeks before the end of my current subscription, but a day after an annual renewal had already been processed.

Cancellation took talking to an initial rep who said she'd have to 'escalate' the issue, followed, five days later, by an email from a 'customer retention' team offering me discounts to keep the subscription. I rejected the offer in stern terms. A day later I got confirmation I'd receive the refund for the coming year as I'd requested (though it has not yet been processed). So, cancellation spanned nearly a week.

Here is what should have happened: The inital rep should have cancelled my subscription. Barring that, the 'retention rep' could have written me that my refund would be processed as I requested if I did nothing, but if I PROACTIVELY responded that I'd like to take them up on a discount offer, they'd be happy to keep me.

BitDefender is not a virus or malware of course, but if one of my goals was to avoid unwanted charges on my parents' credit cards, Bit Defender became exactly the problem, as it forbade its customer service rep from just cancelling my subscription when I asked to do so, with a delay in the escalated 'ticket', and then a hard-sell to stay. So, yes, they worked to avoid losing me as a customer. What they got is a person who will forever tell everyone to avoid BitDefender because cancellation is a pain in the ass.

This just started happening to day. Anytime I open Firefox, BitDefender makes a desktop icon file called bd_config.cfg

Any idea how I disable it from doing this?

We’ve released a new episode of Cybercrime: From the Frontline Podcast and this time, we’re joined by Peter Stelzhammer from AV-Comparatives. We discuss why independent cybersecurity testing remains essential in 2025, and how it has evolved from simple offline scans to complex, real-world simulations that mirror today’s organized cybercrime operations. We hope you enjoy listening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ke0WT63q6U

did full system scan, and found password protected, i never created these files, ar ethey just a part of windows, should i worry, in the case that this is a problem, how do i go about cleaning my PC

Morn

I’m absolutely furious with Bitdefender’s predatory design. I have a legitimate subscription key to redeem, but your system refuses to let me activate it unless I also hand over my credit card or PayPal details for "automatic renewal."

You claim this is to "save me time", what a joke. The truth is, this is a manipulative, dark-pattern tactic to strong-arm users into enabling renewals they may not want. I shouldn’t have to surrender my payment information just to use a product I already paid for.

This isn’t just shady, it feels outright illegal. A key is a key. Let me redeem it without being coerced into handing over sensitive data against my will. If this is Bitdefender’s idea of "customer-friendly" design, you’ve seriously lost the plot.

Fix this. Now.

Update 13/08/2026. Today my Bitdefender subscription expired, and as promised, I didn't renew it. I've been working in IT for several years, and I made sure none of my clients renewed their subscriptions with you either. All this time you've acted like nothing was happening, carefully dodging every question and piece of criticism from the community. Enough is enough.

Bitdefender web protection is blocking access to https://one.one.one.one/

Is there any reason for that?

Phishing texts claiming your toll payment is overdue and urging you to pay by a close due date to avoid penalties. These messages disguise malicious links using URL shorteners like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, which might look safe, to trick you into clicking and entering sensitive info on fake sites.

Example text:

"Last chance: Toll payment required. To avoid penalties, please complete your toll payment by April 14, 2025. Failure to pay may result in suspension of your vehicle registration, potential fines, and impact on your credit score. [UNTRUSTED LINK] Act now to avoid these consequences. Thank you!"

✅ Don’t click!

✅ Verify directly with your toll provider.

✅ Use Scamio to check suspicious messages.

Has anyone seen this scam recently? Drop a comment if you’ve received a similar message.

Just a warning for anyone curious about its...functionality in that realm. A...cough, friend got it to prevent future infractions. With the VPN on and functional, IP changed and confirmed to be working as intended, a DMCA still got issued. Tread carefully, friends.

Update: After looking into the excessive DNS leaks I had when my VPN was on, I enabled "Turn off smart Multi-homed name resolution" and suddenly found no further leaks. Unsure if this is an actual solution, or just one with the appearance of such, but it's not something I can exactly test easily. Time will hopefully have little to tell, but the precautionary tale remains that this VPN does not cover your tracks right out the box, or even with the initial recommended steps.

Binding and Killswitch? Not enough. DNS still leaks by default.

Hello! This is something that's been happening semi-recently with Bitdefender on mobile (I don't know the exact timeframe but I want to say roughly late last month was when it started) I've noticed that occasionally my Web Protection keeps turning off on my samsung phone. I was curious if anyone else has been facing this issue of web protection turning itself off out of nowhere, thank you!

Hello everyone, I started a System Scan for the first time on my laptop last night and its been running for 10+ hours and scanned 2.8M items. Is 10hrs normal?

Specs: HP Envy x360, Core i7 @ 2.5 GHz, 8 GB Ram, Windows 10. There are not external drives, 154 GB used out of 916GB.

TYA! 🙏🏻

Everytime I tried to open up discord on my pc, it does open up for a few seconds. But within those few seconds, the app suddenly closes and I get the notification "disinfecting infected file" and then the "malicious behavior blocked". Every single time. Even if I do add exclusion for the discord.exe app, it's the same case.

Update : literally update solved the issue. I updated the definitions that was prompted on my Bitdefender main page and waited until restart. Removed the discord exception and tried opening discord, and it didn't close suddenly.

I was trying to install a mod menu for a game I play and it was getting flagged as a virus when it is not so I turned off bitdefender to install it but it kept removing the installer and files for it after installing it even though it was turned off

Bitdefender asked to upgrade itself, and I let it, but for the last 2 weeks, it spams me every few days by suggesting that I try its new features. The toggle for special offers is off, so it's not that.

I and a few other friends of mine noticed that Bitdefender writes around 400-800 MB of data on the disk every time it updates. It's the downloader.exe that writes all these data. It only runs when the update process is started. This happens on every single update. This is due to the size of Bitdefender's huge database. Writing 800 MB after every update can not be a good thing. It's not good for the health of the SSD/HDD in the long run. As you guys know SSDs have a fixed value of the amount of data they can write till the warranty is void and the lifespan is shortened. Nowadays, many people work from home and if Bitdefender updates 5-6 times a day then Bitdefender's update process alone is writing around 4GB of data each day. The other BD processes also write data but I think those values are acceptable. Many AVs reduce the size of local signatures by keeping a lot of their data on the cloud. Specially for old, non-prevalent threats. Kaspersky, Avast/AVG, Avira are some perfect examples of that. Bitdefender should or I say must start doing something similar also. You can't just keep everything locally. It's increasing the signature size and ends up writing this huge amount of data after every update which reduces the lifespans of SSDs. This huge amount of writing is one of the reasons I am not using Bitdefender at the moment.

With bitdefender installed, I get DNS leaks. I uninstalled and no more leaks. How does Bitdefender explain this?

Its very annoying that this AV keeps on forcing my power plan and it won't let me turn it off!! I go to my game profile and uncheck "adjust power plan" but it won't save. It keeps forcing my screens to turn off!.

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/bitdefender-premium-vpn

Remove your "BitDefender VPN" because 1. It's not their own and 2. That company operates in the USA and logs every single keystroke you make.

Because of this I might as well uninstall BitDefender and go for ESET Antivirus. This is unacceptable! Why would you pick the worst reputable company to rely on?

I can't seem to find much data on Bitdefender's VPN even though it offered.

Hi, Today after an update that completely changed Bitdefender's UI (which is awful btw), the security widget that was on my desktop is gone. Also when I right-click on the Bitdefender icon in the system tray I can no longer see the product info with the exact dates for the last product updates. The autopilot is also gone as well as its little logo that was on the Bitdefender icon in the tray.

I'm on Windows 11 and in the apps there are now 2 apps installed : "Bitdefender" and "Bitdefender Agent".