Two other good resources are AV-Comparatives (https://www.av-comparatives.org/) and AV-Test (av-test.org). Most AV comparisons by other sites use the results from one or both of these businesses to provide their recommendations. On both test platforms the Microsoft consumer product rates very highly, in this case free is good and not an inferior product. About 10 years ago I would not have recommended it, but it has been improved markedly, it benefits a great deal from the enterprise/commercial edition of Microsoftâs device and network protection.
There are also free AV products from some of the major AV companies that are good for AV protection, they just donât have all the bells and whistles of the paid products.
Beyond AV, it is worth installing the free version of Malwarebytes (just means manually running the scans and updates). When installing Malwarebytes, a user can choose to install as a free version rather than paying for the premium product, it will on the initial install offer a 14 day trial of the premium one and after 14 days it will prompt to either pay or continue as the free version.
Offering versions for consumers actually helps protect the big end of town. There are many personal computing devices out in the World, protecting them helps by reducing virus infections that are in the wild and so a reduction of risk for a business when an possibly infected machine interacts with the business systems. This is why some of the AV companies provide the basic free versions (the AV is good but as I noted no bells and whistles or limited amount of the bells and whistles).
No intent to damage the business by yourself was taken by us in our assessments of the replies you received and our views of the companyâs sites. All the responses to your request, were our various opinions of how we each saw the situation and are our opinions of what we think.
Windows does need some threat protection to be active, but ever since Win8, I have done away with all the Nortons or McAfees, or Kasperski and just used builtin and free Windows Defender.
If you run a threat protection system, use only ONE. Turn off, or better uninstall, any others because they can and do interfere with each other.
Free to use versions turn into âpesterwareâ that keeps bugging you for upgrade to paid versions, or even worse, subscription versions that demand ongoing payment. Or they become âcripplewareâ that detects problems that seemingly need a paid version to fix.
If the computer is not Windows, then I have never bothered with any threat detection software other than that inherently built into the way Unix works. And pretty much everything not Windows is Unix at a fundamental level.
Thank you all. Iâve obviously stirred something up here. My desktop, my iPad and my iPhone are all Apple. I now know how to identify a sender and if it doesnât seem legitimate, to block and report scam with messages. Iâve learned a lot from you all. Thank you.
An âIT companyâ that doesnât use its own website is a massive red flag. No business that provides IT related services would use another platform, especially something as unreliable as Facebook.
I agree with @PhilT. We use Malwarebytes at home and have never had a problem. That this company @grav7s signed up to is now be threatening because the subscription lapsed, is a red flag and should be avoided.
About 4 years ago I helped an elderly friend escape from a fraudulent outfit that sounds very much like your experience. When he refused to part with more money to renew his âsubscriptionâ (due to his pension having been mistakenly cut off and he genuinely had no money to pay them), icons began to disappear from his desktop (he kept most of his files on the desktop - a total disaster to navigate on a big monitor). Thatâs when he panicked, pulled the plug and called me. I subsequently removed the hard drive to examine offline and found a total of 5 remote access programs installed, plus an installer set to run every time he rebooted to make sure they came back. I removed these and managed to undo their damage as they had only been changing the permissions on his files not actually removing or encrypting them. The long and the short of it is never pay for support from an unknown source and in particular never allow them access to your machine.
I use the free version of Malwarebytes for Mac, but I also run a program called âlittle snitchâ which is more like the old Windows Zonealarm than anything. It has a free version which only runs for 3 hours at a time, but seems to have infinite restarts.
Any site that purports to be selling security products but does not have a valid SSL certificate should be (must be) avoided. Do not do business with any such site. Buy Nortons directly from their website, or using a good value product card you can buy from JB Hifi, or similar.
