Do you have antivirus on your phone/tablet?

Do you have antivirus on your phone/tablet?

  • Yes, on all my phones and tablets.

    Votes: 4 15.4%

  • On some, but not on all.

    Votes: 1 3.8%

  • Not on any of my phones/tablets.

    Votes: 21 80.8%
  • Total voters
    26
stiggie

stiggie

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Just wondering how many people have an antivirus application on their smartphones and/or tablets. If you do, please post which one you use and why you chose it.
 
No. Get in the habit of reading the app permissions before installing. That's all the security you need.

EDIT: I do have an app on my phone that lets me wipe it remotely, track the gps location and make a siren go off, in case it was stolen. It also has a nice feature of not being uninstallable, unless you do a full wipe in recovery.
 
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I am a smartass, therefore I will mention the fact that my phone has no antivirus.

lg-envc2ae3-1.jpg


It also has a folded up piece of paper stuck in the battery compartment to prevent random reboots, but that's another story. Other than that, the fact that this phone is basicaly a closed system is appealing for me. I don't want any risk of viruses (or even an iffy OS) causing software based failures.
 
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Yeah, but seeing that will be contained in the browser process, there's not much an antivirus will be able to do. It won't be able to block the malicious website from instructing the browser to perform any of its permitted functions and I have no idea if it's possible to block the browser from accessing a site other than modifying the hosts file, for which you require root. Downloading a virus through the browser won't do anything either, because you'd still have to install it first.
 
Not antivirus, but do look into the type of security app that I described. Lookout or Avast. There's others too.
 
Nope as far as AV goes. If I had a device with more RAM then maybe just for the hell of it, but I don't (512 MB here :() so I won't.

For remote wipe/lock/ring, I use SeekDroid. Plus, my uni uses Exchange for mail and supports remote wipe/lock as well.
 
IceBone said:
No. Get in the habit of reading the app permissions before installing. That's all the security you need.

EDIT: I do have an app on my phone that lets me wipe it remotely, track the gps location and make a siren go off, in case it was stolen. It also has a nice feature of not being uninstallable, unless you do a full wipe in recovery.
Click to expand...


Name, please?


And no, I don?t have it for the reasons mentioned by IceBone.
 
iPhone here, so anti-virus is a non-option. On the other hand, the only exploits that have ever been found have been used to jailbreak and then patched by the jailbreak community, so I'm not really worried. I do have Apple's remote-wipe/tracking service enabled, and I keep my phone locked with a passcode, which is all the security I need.


[aside]
I really don't see the need for anti-virus in general. I do run Security Essentials on the occasionally-used Windows partition of my laptop, but only because it's so unobtrusive, uses so few resources, and only takes 2-3 minutes to set up, that even if it's unnecessary it's not a burden, and some corporate/uni environments get really annoyed if you don't have AV at all. I primarily use OS X and Linux, neither of which have any need for anti-virus software.
[/aside]
 
PacketCollision said:
[aside]
I really don't see the need for anti-virus in general [snip] I primarily use OS X and Linux, neither of which have any need for anti-virus software.
[/aside]
Click to expand...

Isn't there a virus called Flashback running rampant through Apples as we speak?

And what about that Mac Defender malware that Apple was trying so hard to pretend doesn't exist.
 
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Antivirus has a purpose even on a secure OS (which surely does not truly exist, nothing is perfect). There's always the chance of user error. Personally I don't use one on my smartphone, though, it just wouldn't be enough of a hassle to wipe it clean....
 
stiggie said:
Isn't there a virus called Flashback running rampant through Apples as we speak?

And what about that Mac Defender malware that Apple was trying so hard to pretend doesn't exist.
Click to expand...

Flashback has been fixed with an automatic removal tool deployed by Apple. Apple dropped the ball on that one however by taking so long to update Java.

I run LittleSnitch on my main computer that is enough of an AV for me.
 
stiggie said:
Isn't there a virus called Flashback running rampant through Apples as we speak?

And what about that Mac Defender malware that Apple was trying so hard to pretend doesn't exist.
Click to expand...

Both of those require user-intervention to successfully infect the computer. I don't install malware, so I don't have any problems. Note that I haven't had any problems with any Windows installs I've had either, because I always make sure my computer is fully patched and firewalled before I connect it to an unfriendly network.
 
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