This means that they are what they say they are, virus cleaner apps, but they are not what most users expect them to be, which is malware cleaner apps. For example, free products may offer a perfectly reasonable level of protection against classic viruses but hardly any against other forms of malware. Sometimes the exact nature and significance of these differences can be hard to identify and appreciate unless you really know your way around IT. IT-security companies therefore have the most solid of reasons for making sure that their paid products offer a much higher level of functionality than the products they offer for free. The simple fact of the matter is that effective virus cleaner apps cost a lot of money to develop and even more money to keep current so that they continue to provide robust protection in the face of an ever-growing number and range of threats. Emotet banking trojan, which steals data, particularly financial information.Ģ, You Get A Much Higher Level of Protection.Rakhni trojan which is frequently used as a way to infect a device with ransomware or with cryptojackers,.ZeuS/Zbot, which is used to steal your credentials, such as your banking credentials,.Three particularly nasty trojans which are still doing the rounds after many years are: It would take a huge amount of space to cover all the different kinds of damage which can be done by trojans alone, suffice it to say that it can range from “just” causing massive performance issues with your computer or running up your bill by sending SMS to premium numbers, to having your computer hijacked and used to commit cybercrimes against other people to having your own data stolen.

Given that in-app purchases are now commonplace it is again often fairly easy to trick unwary users into thinking this behavior is legitimate.įor the sake of completeness, although fake antivirus trojans are (currently) the most likely threat you’ll encounter, fake antivirus software can be full of all kinds of threats.

Basically the idea behind this malware is that it tricks the user into taking action to activate the virus (which is usually quite straightforward if the user believes that it is security software) after which the app proceeds to “detect” various threats and demands money to remove them. You are able to get help from the developer if you need itĪ significant percentage of the free antivirus apps on the market today are, in actual fact, fake antivirus trojans.

Legiot malware cleaner for mac