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?
I believe that unless you’re doing some extremely important enterprise-level stuff and absolutely need that extra 0.1% of protection, antiviruses are really unnecessary for anyone. The best way to prevent malware is to keep everything up to date and ensure you’re installing software properly. That’ll prevent nearly all malware completely. Most of the stuff it won’t prevent also won’t be prevented by anti-malware programs, so I personally think they’re really not worth it.
I’d agree, with the caveat if you’re pirating stuff (especially software) in that case it often makes sense to have a little more protection and I see it as justified by the savings of pirating software versus paying. Because a lot of pirated software gets stuffed with malware, downloaders which often hit you with ransomware (mitigated best with offline back-ups but few people are perfect enough to maintain such). In that case it can save you great pain (though you still need to pay attention and practice basic safe piracy hygiene).
I’d also offer the caveat that if you’re an activist you could be targeted. A good security software could help in that situation though it really needs to be paired with significant security education, system hardening, etc.
If you’re pirating software and don’t know how to run a VM or don’t have a separate machine to run it on (in case it contains a VM-busting exploit), then yes, it can be useful. However, I would personally prefer to buy a separate machine and run a VM on it than pay for a subscription service.
In this case, I’d say you should probably be running a Linux distro specifically designed for this purpose. Something like Qubes OS would work well.
Agreed. But ideals are ideals. Part of good security education is realizing whether you like it or not the limitations of your average user and configuring to the reality rather than the optimum.
Qubes is good but it’s not something I’d call beginner friendly. It is an operating system for advanced users. I’d say if you’re going to go the non-traditional OS route, at that point just boot to Tails selectively.
Honestly a lot of advice to be given here is non-specific because we don’t know OP’s situation, their threat model, how educated in computer literacy they are, etc.
But an adblocker with up to date software, security patches applied, basic user education and care leaves most people quite safe.