Avast Releases New Features to Stop Phishing and Online Scams

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Avast today announced that it has expanded its flagship product Avast One with a number of new features designed to protect users from online scams, fraud and other privacy threats.

The solution, which already included an antivirus, VPN and data breach monitoring service, now includes new features including Email Guardian, an anti-email phishing solution, Online Safety Score, which monitors the cyber hygiene of devices, and Privacy Advisor, a step – step-by-step guide to show users how to optimize their privacy settings on social media.

While many new features have been launched, Avast has put a lot of effort into tackling phishing and social engineering scams. For enterprises, these new features have the potential to provide additional protection against cyber-attacks that rely on manipulating users into clicking malicious links via email and text messages.

For example, Email Guardian, one of the new features announced, is designed to fight phishing threats by blocking malicious email attachments received in email apps installed on the desktop.

Similarly, Scam Protection for Android notifies the user when they receive a potentially malicious text message, social media or messaging app message. Secure links are automatically opened in the browser, while dangerous links generate a notification to warn the user so that they can decide whether to continue or not.

Dealing with manipulation and phishing attempts

The announcement comes amid an alarming rise in phishing and smishing threats (text messaging scams), with 83% of organizations reporting having had a successful email-based phishing attack by 2021, while 74% of the organizations with smishing attacks that same year. †

“We know that scams are a concern for many 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,” says Vita Santrucek, chief product officer at Avast.

“Not only are scams and other forms of online fraud ubiquitous, they are also more sophisticated, to the extent that it’s really hard to distinguish between content that is benign and content that is designed to be abusive. Scammers take advantage of current events to bring in people; For example, two years ago we saw a spike in COVID-related scams and in February and March of this year we saw scams related to the war in Ukraine.”

Avast One’s new features are designed to meet this challenge by helping users identify unsafe attachments in emails and unsafe links in text or instant messages, so they don’t have to manually trap threats. This approach reduces the chances of the user clicking on something malicious.

The all-in-one security market

Avast One offers a diverse set of solutions and operates in many segments of the global cybersecurity market, valued at $139.77 billion in 2021 and projected to be $376.32 billion by 2029.

The provider competes with an array of “all-in-one” security providers, offering a mix of antivirus, VPN, and data breach scanning capabilities.

One of Avast One’s main competitors is McAfee, which offers users an antivirus and VPN, which was bought last year for $14 billion by a consortium of six investment companies.

Another competitor is Bitdefender, which offers users a combination of browser protection, data breach scanning and a VPN, protecting more than 500 million systems and 38% of the world’s security solutions.

According to data from the AV-Test Institute, the antivirus capabilities of Avast, McAfee, and Bitdefender on Windows are similar, each scoring a 6 on protection, performance, and usability.

With the introduction of new features to help users defend themselves against email and SMS-based phishing attempts, Avast is trying to differentiate itself by offering more comprehensive coverage against social engineering and phishing scams.

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This post Avast Releases New Features to Stop Phishing and Online Scams

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/04/05/avast-releases-new-features-to-stop-phishing-and-online-scams/”