The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC.
"Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.
This article was written by the same guy who last week described Steve Wozniak as "infamous" in a different article, then later went back and changed it.
I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.
Realistically even if you had the equipment, those phones are beyond economical repair given the amount of time you would have to invest in fixing them.
Even if you remove key Windows files sometimes Windows can recover its self using the backup copies located in %windir%\winsxs\Backup (and several other places depending on system configuration).
But generally bricking refers to the state of disrepair where something has to be thrown in the bin because it cannot be used in the future. The closest PC equivalents would be either corrupting the BIOS/UEFI or over-heating a component like the graphics card.
In my experience bricking refers to the rendering of a device inoperable (and irreparable) by the means available to a savvy user. Usually by method of failed firmware flash.
Generally you're looking at soldering some wires up to whatever chip and reflashing it manually.
I know, the point of my comment was that it's almost as hard to brick a phone as it is bricking a PC. You've got to kill the bootloader to achieve this, which rarely happens, even when you flash a corrupt OS.
Recent movement (last couple of years) by AV companies blocking everything which leads legitimate small businesses to take the stupid whitelisting route via AV companies or pointless customer calls to explain it's a false positive (and even when customer is convinced it's still not good enough because corporate doesn't allow them to exclude some binaries or disable AV).
My employer got hit by this yesterday so I'm seeing occasional Sophos notifications. Sophos sucks just as badly as any other AV program: it slows down my laptop, shortens battery life, and has an uncanny knack for deciding to run a full scan right when I'm in the middle of something important.
Sophos has been around for a very long time. I don't understand how an anti-virus company could not take action to prevent this time of thing from happening.
1) Why don't they have a secure hash of each of the files and add that to a whitelist of files never to delete?
2) "You want to ensure your secondary option (when cleanup is not available or does not work) to be set to 'deny access' and not delete or move." Is this not the default configuration?
"Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.