I’ve recently downloaded mullvad. I heard it’s popular in the piracy community. 5 dollars a month is not bad. Currently saving for a good antivirus. What are your favorites?
I’ve recently downloaded mullvad. I heard it’s popular in the piracy community. 5 dollars a month is not bad. Currently saving for a good antivirus. What are your favorites?
On Windows, I’d say nearly every antivirus program I’ve ever seen is actually a scam that is overpriced and will spam you with messages about upgrading to a more expensive plan, and about how vulnerable you are without it if you choose to cancel your subscription.
The best way to avoid malware is to ensure you are properly installing software. While there are zero-click exploits which install themselves without user interaction, they are extremely, extremely rare, even on Windows, and antivirus programs can’t do much against them anyway.
If you want to avoid malware, I’d say instead of installing an antivirus, save yourself some money and just make sure you are downloading from official sources, verify checksums when they’re available, and keep your programs up to date. That will save you from 99% of malware, and the other 1% most likely wouldn’t have been prevented by the anti-malware anyway.
Not a scam but it is a somewhat predatory business model to convince most people they need this stuff, much like home security system salespeople convincing you burglars are all over the place and your stuff is going to be hit any day now for certain. Many admittedly are very poor in protection, rely entirely on definitions, and don’t invest a lot in mitigating threats. But some are good and when properly configured can even interrupt or stop many state actor campaigns or at least make a bigger headache for them when paired with other defense in depth steps.
Very true. Most malware is through clicking big green flashing ad download buttons and getting malware that way or installing bundled software by not reading the installer terms or simply installing untrustworthy software.
Not entirely true. Good security suites have anti-scripting and exploit detection and can and will detect and interrupt the exploit chain from fully unfolding, downloading, and executing its payload. The thing is most people won’t encounter this kind of thing. It really depends on your threat model.
This is one of the smartest things you can do to avoid even targeted attacks. Virustotal is also a useful tool here.
Ultimately for most people it isn’t worthwhile paying for this stuff but it’s something only the person in question can make a decision about.
I’d say being informed is a requisite even with using good security software. If your HIPS goes off and tells you that this new software is accessing certain registry keys or performing certain actions, unless you know enough about your operating system to understand the implications and what looks like malicious behavior you can’t really make good judgements on the data.