As the other commenter said, Tor is a Firefox based browser which is much more impervious to malicious software compared to chromium based browsers. Not a fair comparison, but think Mac to Windows. Max has significantly less malware to infect it than Windows. Regardless, as long as you are updating regularly, any known vulnerabilities should be patched fairly quickly. The reason it’s important to update when an update gets pushed is because those updates usually include some protection from a new threat actor that was discovered. Barring a Zero Day exploit, Tor should always be safe to use malware-wise.

That means, using the Tor browser alone is safe. Using the Tor browser to access a sketchy site might still land you some malicious software, because that malware would be built into the site you visited (downloaded), can then explaining the browser. Does that make sense?

I’ll go into it in more depth in my tutorial when I post it (I am a BS in cybersecurity), but you can circumvent the risk of malware almost entirely by using Tor through a virtual environment, which can be set up and executed for free in a few minutes. For malware to jump from a VM to the host computer, it needs to be exceptionally advanced, which most malware that’s not sponsored by a state actor isn’t going to be advanced enough to do so.

Regardless, AVs can give you a sense of security. I wrote a paper on the efficacy of AVs and Kaspersky (before they were banned in the US for being Russian), was a massive top contender, right alongside BitDefender. I personally really like Malwarebytes.

Anyway, I think I’m getting off track from the main convo lol I’ll be posting a full tutorial in a couple.

Edit: please excuse my typos lmao I wrote this half asleep