Do Individuals with home devices need to to keep spending money on Anti-Virus software such as Trend, Avast/AVG, McAfee, Norton, Bitdefender, Kaspersky etc. to stay secure?
Our advice, and that which is echoed by the Australian Governments Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) https://www.cyber.gov.au/ is that you should not rely on an annual purchase of an AV to keep you secure, in fact purchasing an AV packaging is most likely lulling people (especially the more vulnerable amongst us) into a false sense of security, mainly due to the change of tactics that scammers are employing these days
The scamming tactics of bad-actors have changed in the last 2 years, with as few as 18% of attacks attributable to those vulnerabilities that Anti Virus products were designed for especially on Windows 7 and earlier.
The Notifiable Data Breaches Report: July–December 2022 from OAIC (Office of the Australian Information Commissioner) summarises the source and methods used in Australian data breaches in the first half of 2022
The Anti Virus products being purchased by most individuals and small-businesses are not addressing the most proliferant types of scams aimed at individuals and small businesses.
Alongwith the Australian Governments Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) https://www.cyber.gov.au/ we recommend the following to protect indivuals from scams in 2023
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