Antivirus

Avast overhauls flagship antivirus service to shield against online scams

Audio player loading… The antivirus (opens in new tab) maker Avast has upgraded its all-in-one protection service Avast One (opens in new tab) with new features aimed at protecting users from online scams, fraud and other personal privacy threats.According to a recent study carried out by the company, the three most common ways consumers and…

Published 4 years ago in 6th April 2022

By John

Avast overhauls flagship antivirus service to shield against online scams

The antivirus (opens in new tab) maker Avast has upgraded its all-in-one protection service Avast One (opens in new tab) with new features aimed at protecting users from online scams, fraud and other personal privacy threats.

According to a recent study carried out by the company, the three most common ways consumers and businesses are targeted by scammers include email (62%), text messages (52%) and through social media (29%). For this reason, Avast has decided to add scam and online fraud protection to its flagship antivirus offering.

The update to Avast One also includes a new feature launching on Windows and Android called Online Safety Score that provides users with regular feedback on their digital habits and gives them personalized tips to improve their online and device safety. Meanwhile, Privacy Advisor is an educational tool that offers simple step-by-step instructions to adjust and improve privacy settings on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other popular online platforms.

Chief product officer at Avast, Vita Santrucek explained in a press release (opens in new tab) how the company’s new additions to Avast One can help users feel safer and less at risk of online scams, saying:

“We know scams are a cause for concern for a lot of people so our goal with the new additions to the Avast One suite was to help them regain confidence and peace of mind when using the internet and their devices. Not only are scams and other forms of online fraud more pervasive, they’re also more sophisticated, to the extent it’s really hard to differentiate between content that’s benign and content designed to exploit. Scammers take advantage of current affairs to reel people in, for example, two years ago we saw a spike in Covid-related scams, and in February and March this year we saw scams related to the Ukraine war.”

Email Guardian, Scam Protection and Smart VPN

In addition to Online Safety Score and Privacy Advisor, the free version of Avast One, Avast One Essential, is also getting another new feature in the form of Email Guardian.

Email Guardian blocks malicious attachments (opens in new tab) in emails and prevents users from sending these dangerous files to others. When a malicious attachment is detected, an alert is displayed and from here, a user can still choose to download a file if they think it is safe on Windows and Mac.

The paid versions of Avast One, Avast One Individual and Family, are getting two new features in the form of Scam Protection and Smart VPN.

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As the name suggests, Scam Protection helps protect users from scams by notifying them when they receive a text or social media message where a potentially dangerous link (opens in new tab) has been identified. If the link is safe, it’s opened automatically in a user’s browser (opens in new tab) but if it’s

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Bitdefender parental control review: Plans and pricing

Bitdefender no longer offers its parental control features as a standalone subscription. You’d have to get one of its four family plans. But note that its entire suite of parental control features is available with each of these four plans.

The Total Security Family plan starts at $79.99 for the first year and covers up to 25 devices across five family members. At this price, the cost boils down to around $16 per member per year, which is more affordable than many other parental control applications. Not to forget that, for the price, you also get 24/7 real-time antivirus protection for up to 25 devices, as well as a password manager.

Bitdefender Family pricing — (Image credit: Bitdefender)

Next is the Premium Security Plan, which costs $99.99 for the first year and also comes with scam protection, AI-based scam protection, and a VPN with 4,000+ servers in 50+ countries. The Ultimate Security Family Plan and the Ultimate Security Plus Family Plan cost $119.99 and $199.99 for the first year, respectively.

The former comes with dark web monitoring and identity theft protection features such as an identity protection score and real-time breach notifications, while the latter also includes $2 million in identity theft insurance, three-bureau credit monitoring, and other bank, credit card, and investment alerts.

Bitdefender parental control review: Features

One of the standout Bitdefender parental control features is the ability to set screen-time schedules for your children, who would only be able to access their devices during the allowed time intervals.

Along with this, Bitdefender also offers several preset routines: Focus Time, Family Time, and Bedtime, which you can customize as per your child’s daily activity and schedule.

Bitdefender parental control dashboard — (Image credit: Bitdefender)

There’s also a pretty handy internet time management feature, which allows you to control how much time your child spends on the internet during a day. A nice addition is the ability to reward extra screen time for your children for responsible online use.

In addition to internet scheduling, parents can also choose to cut off internet access directly on their child’s device using Bitdefender’s Stop Internet feature.

Bitdefender also offers predefined age-appropriate filtering categories to help you filter out inappropriate content such as porn, betting, or online gaming for your children. As with screen time, you can also fine-tune these filters to better suit your child’s day-to-day use.

Apart from category-level filtering, parents can also allowlist or blocklist specific URLs individually, in case you want to go beyond the category selection.

Parents can set up to five child profiles, each with the child’s name, photo, and birth date. Bitdefender automatically applies age-appropriate filtering as soon as the profile is created, which parents can then edit as per their needs.

Along with this, there’s also location tracking, which helps you know where your child is on an interactive map at all times.

Lastly, there’s Safe Search, which lets you remove explicit and harmful results from search engines, as well as YouTube restrictions, which ensure your child only views age-appropriate videos on the platform.

However, note that content filtering and safe browsing require an active VPN connection to function, as per Bitdefender’s listing on the Google Play Store.

Bitdefender parental control review: Interface and in-use

Bitdefender parental control works across Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. That said, Windows and Android get full, unrestricted enforcement of every feature, whereas macOS and iOS are noticeably more limited, largely due to Apple’s own platform restrictions.

For instance, iOS content filtering runs through Apple’s Screen Time and not Bitdefender’s own engine. Parents have to create a child account through Apple ID, then Bitdefender’s app hooks into Apple’s Screen Time restrictions rather than doing its own independent content filtering.

However, the setup is pretty simple. You just have to download the app on your child’s own device. Unlike other parental control applications, you can’t download the app on your child’s phone remotely – you’ll need physical access to the device to do so.

One thing worth noticing is that, after the 2025 overhaul, parental control is no longer configured within the Bitdefender Central mobile app, but from the Bitdefender Central web dashboard, which can still be accessed through the mobile application.

Once you’re on this dashboard, day-to-day use is genuinely easy. Bitdefender’s Activity Dashboard is filled with several graphs and charts, which allow you to check your child’s phone activity at just a glance.

For example, there’s a bar chart showing their daily internet time over the past few days, as well as a pie chart showing their current day’s internet usage along with their remaining time. The dashboard also gives parents visibility into what’s actually being blocked and when.

The Prevented Content Access panel is a running log of every link blocked on the child’s device over the past 7 or 30 days. This allows you to see whether your filtering settings are actually able to catch anything, or whether your child is repeatedly trying to search for restricted websites on their device.

Bitdefender par

Microsoft Defender briefly decided Google Search was malware

You can pay every month for Office 365’s productivity tools, but you still can’t escape Microsoft Defender’s habit of turning everyday links into fake security alerts. On September 2, Office 365 subscribers ran into an unusual incident: Redmond’s endpoint antivirus engine began flagging Google Search results as potentially malicious URLs.Read Entire Article…

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Watch out for this fake Face ID Apple Pay pop-up scam

Macworld The security, antivirus, and VPN company Malwarebytes has an interesting post on its Malwarebytes Labs blog detailing a new and sophisticated scam. The web-based trick is meant to make users think that they just made a big payment with Apple Pay, with the goal being to trick them into calling a fake “Apple Support”

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Avast overhauls flagship antivirus service to shield against online scams

Email Guardian, Scam Protection and Smart VPN

Bitdefender Family parental control review

Bitdefender parental control review: Plans and pricing

Bitdefender parental control review: Features

Bitdefender parental control review: Interface and in-use

Bitdefender par

Microsoft Defender briefly decided Google Search was malware

5 Windows Security Settings You Should Never Skip Over

Watch out for this fake Face ID Apple Pay pop-up scam

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