Antivirus for Windows, iOS and Android

[Pink Gregory]

Getting Ms. Gregory a tablet for christmastide and now we've got a few devices going (2 phones, tablet, desktop and occasional laptop) and wouldn't mind paying for a decent antivirus program that's maybe jut a step up from free and that we can usw over multiple platforms.

Any recommendations would be welcome, worth looking into a VPN service as well/as an alternative?

[Ignatius_S]

Unless you're jailbreaking an iOS device, I would question the wisdom of using such software for these devices. Apple is very responsive for issuing security updates and the main risk someone would have is jailbreaking and downloading software outside the iOS ecosystem. Slight caveat, Apple will enable users to side load apps from outside the App Store in the future, which potentially has security implications if you use that; on the other hand, this does remove one of the reasons why people jailbreak and as that carries a security risk, it could be argued that this could improve safety in some ways.

Although the risks on Android are greater, realistically, we're still talking very low here and whatever you're running, the key thing is to avoid falling for phishing tricks.

All that aside, if you're looking at an all-in-one service, I would say that Avast One or Bitdefender would be the ones to look at most. IIRC, the latter has an offer to have a VPN bundled as well. Going from memory, one the shared cons of both is that there's an increase in price in the second year - although I would say, value is subjective and someone needs to break down how that price for them, in terms of how many devices are being protected and how much it's used.

Regarding a VPN, the value will be very dependent and would say have a look at a few articles about usage and think about how that applies to you both (or not). Trying a service for a month isn't a bad idea just to see how/why you use it (or not).

[Sebastian Cobb]

Agree with Ignatius although I wouldn't even bother with third-party AV for Windows these days, Windows Defender or whatever they're calling it now is about as good as the paid offerings.

I use VPN's but don't think you need one unless you're doing specific things, if you elaborate on what you think you need one for I can help more. As everything [should be] over HTTPS nowadays all a VPN or ISP should see these days is the domain you're connecting to, not the page of the site itself so all you're really doing is moving the trust along from one organisation to another. And some of the big names have now been bought out by shady spyware companies so they're probably harvesting the domains people are connecting to anyway.

[Pink Gregory]

we don't do anything out of the ordinary, we're very conventional tech users in that sense

Just thinking about bank apps, online shopping, that sort of thing

guess we could probably get away with free but the peace of mind helps sometimes

[Sebastian Cobb]

I wouldn't bother then, unless there's some specific geo-restricted sites you want to use. It won't stop cookie/session tracking and some big legit businesses might even be hostile to vpn's as they might think you're using stolen details.

Using google with a vpn can be a pain in the arse as it throws captchas at you all the time.

[katzenjammer]

I bought an asus router recently that lets you configure a VPN, so now I have my phone internet data automatically routed via that whenever I'm away from home. Quite a nice free layer of security that lets me easily access everything on my home LAN and get the ad blocking from the pihole I have connected there