Hi. I have gotten avast premium for 1 year for 73% off (because I'm a long-time user) and so far I'm loving it, but I've been wondering about the ransomware shield and firewall. Usually, I'm kinda paranoid when it comes to the security of my PC, so I enabled Strict Mode for Firewall and Ransomware shield, but later turned strict mode off because the firewall kept bugging me if I wanted to let windows processes and other non-malicious stuff access the network, and the Ransomware Shield threw errors at me when I was trying to download something using Chrome (because I set my user profile as a protected file without realizing) so I set both to Smart Mode. I have been wondering though since smart mode allows protected apps through if somehow a protected app is hijacked and started distributing malware to people who had the program, would Avast still protect my files and wouldn't let the hijacked app through even though the app is a protected one?
