A
please advice...i sometimes use netbanking on the mobile...which AV to be used...willing to buy a paid version also...thanks...Anirudh
AV for Android
You don't need it.
B
Virus can't do shit in linux
W
As long as phone is not rooted, very little advantage of using AV in android. Just don't give critical system permissions to shady/some unknown app & you should be fine.
W
Actually they can but most are targeted towards server versions of linux as majority of servers in the world run on linux(just opposite of pc market where majority run on windows).
@Desmond David @Nerevarine
B
@whitestar_999
I was talking about Android which is based on linux. But yea mostly they target windows.
I was talking about Android which is based on linux. But yea mostly they target windows.
Yeah, still it's a rarity because it mostly comes down to bugs in the system that the malware exploits. However, in actively developed projects, such bugs are generally fixed quickly. That is why whenever you use any open source software, you must always make sure that it's an active project by checking when the last update was released and try to avoid projects that haven't been updated in a long time.
Android has different problems though, the main vector of attack are malware apps that abuse permissions. While it's Google's responsibility that such apps should not be published on the play store, they are surprisingly slow to respond. Thus it's up to the user to not install such apps. Now, tech savvy users like most of the members on this forum will know the red flags to look for when installing an app and checking whether it's potential malware, but the vast majority of people are not and might not understand the importance of permissions. For such people, I think the anti-virus is helpful.
Android has different problems though, the main vector of attack are malware apps that abuse permissions. While it's Google's responsibility that such apps should not be published on the play store, they are surprisingly slow to respond. Thus it's up to the user to not install such apps. Now, tech savvy users like most of the members on this forum will know the red flags to look for when installing an app and checking whether it's potential malware, but the vast majority of people are not and might not understand the importance of permissions. For such people, I think the anti-virus is helpful.
W
Is it? I think many malware apps don't actually have any malware code in them but rather it is served through the ads they display & from whatever I have seen most android AVs don't exactly work like their pc counterpart so I doubt they are very effective against such types of exploit. There are also instances where some major apps by some big Chinese companies & installed in millions were removed from playstore after some security researchers found malware in them which shows that even AVs are useless against them if it needs personal deep inspection by security researchers to catch them.
If the app has access to your contacts or storage, it can read info here and send it to some server without your knowledge. Same for location. You just have to trust whether the app is operating in good faith or not. Unless the app is open source, you will not know that unless you are doing some deep packet analysis. While they are called anti-virus apps, such apps actually also help identify potentially dubious apps.
W
I tried some free AV apps & judging by their scan speed it seems signature based & not heuristic/code analysis based like in their pc counterparts. As for open source apps I guess that leaves only known/reputed developers at xda but not all of them release their apps on playstore(by principle or google policy restrictions) & some do only as paid/donation app(like MiXplorer Silver is paid at playstore while MiXplorer apk is free at xda, not complaining btw as this app deserves money).
Agreed. Though I think that's because phone OSs are generally much more locked-down compared to desktop OSs. So there isn't much to do unless running at root level. But I wouldn't trust any random app to run on root, even an AV.
It'll do nothing but slow the phone. No need. Use google play, enable play protect and you're gucci.