December 9, 2025 • 43 mins
How secure is your cell phone? Not as secure as you might think. We are getting better at securing our other devices but what about our cell phones. If you think about everything you do on your cell phone, you will understand why you need to lock it down.
Let’s Talk About Scams is broadcast live Tuesdays at 8AM PT on K4HD Radio - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Let’s Talk About Scams TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Let’s Talk About Scams Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional / legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references; however, R.O.S.E. Resources / Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/let-s-talk-about-scams--6483699/support.
Let’s Talk About Scams is broadcast live Tuesdays at 8AM PT on K4HD Radio - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Let’s Talk About Scams TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Let’s Talk About Scams Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional / legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references; however, R.O.S.E. Resources / Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/let-s-talk-about-scams--6483699/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek
(00:22):
the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any
suggested ideas in The information contained in this podcast is
intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute
for individual professional legal advice. The podcast information was carefully
compiled from vetted sources and references. However, Rose resources outreach
(00:44):
to safeguard the elderly cannot guarantee that you will not
fall victim to a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's
the must listen show for anyone who wants to protect
themselves and their loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday am
Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder
(01:05):
of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and
practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams.
And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Hi, everyone, welcome back, to let's talk about scams. I'm
Joyce Petrowski, founder and board president of Rose Resources Outreach
to Safeguard the elderly. You can find more information on
our website at Roseadvocacy dot org. On the homepage you'll
find all of our social media channels Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube,
(01:41):
and you're going to want to subscribe to the YouTube
channels so you don't miss an episode of this show.
We have all of our past episodes on there, and
the shorts are on there as well. If you scroll
down to the bottom of that page, you will find
you can sign up for our newsletters. We send one
(02:03):
in the mail at the beginning of every month, and
we do one via email, and the larger email newsletter
goes out at the beginning of every month. December's went
out last Friday, December fifth. But every Tuesday morning at
nine fifteen, you're going to get a Tuesday Tip, and
that Tuesday tip is one to give you information that
(02:25):
you might not have known or even if you did
know the information. The second and more important part of
it is it's a reminder. It's a reminder to keep
scam prevention top of mind so you keep your healthy skepticism,
your healthy scam prevention habits, So the next time you
are contacted by a scammer, you're going to be more
(02:47):
apt to think scam and then know the steps to
go through to determine if it really is a scam,
to verify before you can trust it, talk to your
trusted person about the situation. Different things like that, So
you're going to you can sign up for one or
you can sign up for both of them. It's a
way to get some great information. And another great thing
(03:08):
about the Tuesday Tip or even our mailed newsletter or
the larger emailed newsletter is it's going to give you
information that you can use as a conversation starter. You
can take this information. You can talk to your older
loved ones in regular conversation. You know, it doesn't have
to be a conversation where you're like, don't do this,
(03:31):
don't do that, don't do this. You can use it
to say, hey, you know, I just learned about this
new protection tool. I just learned about this new scam
that's been going around. Did you know about it? You know,
have you received any of these text messages or phone
calls or it's a way to keep that conversation going
(03:51):
and it lets your older loved one also know that, Hey,
you can come talk to me. You know, if you
do happen to click on a link or respond to
a text message, or maybe you've given your credit card
number out and then realized you think it might be
a scam, come talk to me about it, and I
can help you mitigate the damages. And you know I
(04:11):
can help you if it's identity theft, we can work
through the process of getting your identity back. Anyways, lots
of great information and lots of great ways you can
use this information. So today we're going to talk about
securing your cell phones. I think just about everybody has
(04:33):
a cell phone these days, and the majority of the
cell phones are connected to the internet. We do a
lot of stuff on our cell phones. I think we
just automatically go to our cell phones to do things
versus going to our laptop or our desktop or iPad
or anything like that. You know, big reason is your
(04:54):
cell phone's the most portable thing, right instead of carrying
around a bulky laptop or a bigger iPad, your cell
phone's portable. You might have it in your purse, your
back pocket. You know, your your briefcase, you know, whatever
it is that you're carrying, and so you know, we're
on it all the time, you know, whether we're talking
(05:16):
on the phone, or we're texting, or we're checking our emails,
or we're searching for something online. With the holidays coming up,
you know, we might be on it to search for
Christmas gifts, for holiday gifts. You know, you might be
on social media on there. There's a wide variety of
social media apps out there, and a lot of people
(05:38):
do their banking right. A lot of, if not all
of the banks have their app where you can do
your banking on your phone. Right, somebody gives you a check,
because yes, there are still people out there that write checks.
I'm one of them. I'm sure there's a lot of
people out there. Don't necessar sarely write checks for everything,
(06:01):
but we do still write checks for certain things. And
if someone hands you a check, you know a lot
of times people aren't going to take time out to
have to go to the bank and stand in line
and do all that to make that deposit. So they're
going to do a deposit right on their phone. And
maybe they want to check their banking activity or they
(06:22):
want to check their banking balance or you know, their
credit card activity, or transfer money between accounts, you know whatever.
A lot of times we pick up our phones to
do that. And I also think we're good at for
the most part, we're good at securing our desktop computers,
(06:43):
our laptop, our iPads, because I think we think of
those more as computers. But we really need to think
of our cell phones as mobile computers. With everything that
can be done on the cell phones and that that
is done on the cell phones, we have to lock
down and secure our cell phones or our mobile computers.
(07:08):
We have a short video that's going to be coming out,
I believe next week. I believe it might be the
Tip Tuesday for next week. It's a short little video
that I did about you need to secure your cell phones.
You need to treat them as mobile computers. So, and
another thing that I've heard is from people is well,
I have an iPhone and I've been told I don't
(07:30):
need any added security, that it's enough. Well, nothing is
full proof. So iPhones are not full proof. Android phones
are not full proof. They are susceptible to being hacked into.
They are susceptible to not catch you know, every malicious
(07:52):
site that's out there. So having added security measures on
your phone, whether it's an iPhone or an Android, is
the thing that you can do. Now you might ask, well,
what security should I have? Right, Well, that's a that's
a question that looks different to really everybody because we're
(08:14):
all different. What we do on our phones is different,
what risk we like to take, our risk tolerance level
is different as well. Our convenience what we see is
trading convenience for risk is different. So that's why it's
good to do some research. Now. One of the tips
that we give out is, you know, we always talk
(08:36):
about be aware of your emotions, have a trusted person
you can talk to about anything you want to verify
before you can even begin to trust. Be careful of
you know, payment options, and you know, guard your personal information.
But another just as important tip is having that go
to tech support person. And we've talked about this a lot.
(08:59):
There are companies out there that provide this tech support.
Some of them might only do commercial you know, properties,
so they might be if you know, work for might
be contracted with your employer to do all of their
cybersecurity and lock down all of the company's uh computers
and and and software and all of that stuff. But
(09:23):
they might also have a consumer part of it where
they work with individuals and homes and your mobile computers
and your your mobile phones and your personal devices. There's
a lot of you know, individual people out there, whether
they've set up a company or not. They're really good
(09:45):
tech support people and a lot of times they can
help you with your devices by remoting into your device.
Now you have to allow that to happen, which is
why you need to trust this person that they are
are only going to do what you've asked them to do.
And when they say they've disconnected, they've disconnected the line
(10:10):
of them remoting the session that they've actually disconnected it
and they've not left anything in the background right that
they're watching everything you do, like a malicious site might do,
or a virus on your computer or something like that.
So that's why you need to have a trusted one.
But a lot of times these tech support people they
(10:31):
also know cell phones. Some of them might know both
Android and iPhones. Some of them might specialize in Android
where others will specialize in iPhones. But it's a good
question to ask because they know a lot of these
softwares that you can get and what works best for iPhones,
(10:52):
and they've maybe through experience, but they've done a lot
of this research. But if you want to do the
research on your own, I'm going to share my screen
now and kind of walk you through some stuff that
I was looking at. And uh so you can hang
on a second. There we go, so you can kind
(11:13):
of see how we you know, when we say to
do your research. So you know, there's a lot of
great companies out there, tech companies that will evaluate a
bunch of different softwares and apps and stuff like that,
(11:35):
and they continually monitor and evaluate these apps, and then
they update their articles quite frequently with new information. And
so one of the one of the tech companies that
we've used quite frequently for different information is PC Magazine.
(11:56):
And so basically I've just got into this PCMag dot
com and I come over here to the menu, and
I scrolled down and there's how to reviews comparisons best products.
So I just went into best products and you can
go down through here and you can scroll and you
can see all the best products. But if you're looking
for a monitor, a printer, some gaming or graphics, video editing,
(12:20):
web hosting. There's password managers, antivirus software, robot vacuums, headphones, TVs,
all kinds of stuff. Wi Fi's the best phones, external
hard drives, but the one I pulled up was the
best VPN services for twenty twenty five. And so that's
the virtual private network, which is what we recommend in
(12:43):
our resource packet and in our presentations. We recommend that
if your only option is to be on public Wi Fi,
even if it's password protective, public Wi Fi, that's not
as secure as maybe the Wi Fi you have at
your home. And why would even though both of them
(13:05):
are password protected, why would the other one not be
as secure as yours? Well, like a hotel, right, their
wifis password protected, but how many people know that password
and how often do they change it? Right? So, even
if they change it every day, the people that are
staying in there that day know the password. And if
(13:26):
there's a thousand people in there, there's a thousand people
that know that password, and are ten of them or
five of them or one of them, you know a
criminal that's just trying to get in and using that
password protected Wi Fi to get into anybody that's on
that Wi Fi. So and even you know, coffee shops
(13:46):
and different things like that, even if it's their wifi's
password protected, you have to ask yourself the question how
many people know that password? And then you need to
make the decision do you think this is really secure?
Or are you going to protect yourself and use a
virtual private network when you are using the internet while
(14:07):
you're connected to their WiFi. Now, you know, you could say, well,
what harm is it if I'm checking the weather, right,
you know something like that, if I'm using public Wi Fi. Well,
if you're checking the weather, okay, it's you know not,
you wouldn't think that. You would think that's pretty harmless.
But you know what if there's a fake weather site
(14:30):
out there that the criminals have cloned, and by you
getting on that website, they're now installing malware. You know,
I don't know. I'm just, for lack of a better term,
trying to be the devil's advocate here to try to
get people to think more about what they're doing online
and are they really protected. So the virtual private networks
(14:53):
are going to really help with this. They're going to
encrypt your information that you're doing. You can also use
your person sal hotspot on your phones. But this company
here has gone through and they have and evaluated a
bunch of different virtual private networks, and you can look
(15:16):
and like their best overall pick is Proton VPN, and
you can expand it here and look at the pros
and cons. Okay, best free plan we've seen, industry leading
privacy standards. They have a global server network, numerous additional
privacy tools, they have ample customer support. You can also
(15:37):
look at the cons. Now, your tech support person is
going to be able to tell you what high latency
scores and testing is. But you can also scroll all
the way down and take a deeper dive into their
top tested picks. So you can go down here and
they're going to say, give you some more information. Earns
(15:58):
a five star rating. While the core paid VPN service
price is average, they have the best free VPN subscription
we've seen. Now a lot of times we tell you
stay away from free services because they don't have a
lot of the security measures that you really should have.
But we also understand not everybody's budget allows them to
(16:21):
pay for all of these different services, and so a
free VPN service might be what your budget allows and
what you need, and a free one is better than
not having anything at all. So this one PC magazine
has determined has the best free subscription. Now you can
(16:46):
look at you know, open this up. Well why did
they pick it? Well, they said an additional to the
usual VPN capabilities, there's an AD blocker, a kill switch,
a malware blocker, port forwardings, split tunneling, some of these things.
You know, you might have to look up what does
split tunneling mean? Or maybe you just get the customer
(17:07):
service number and you call them and say, hey, what
is split tunneling? How's that going to benefit me? You know,
what's support forwarding and how does that benefit me? But
your tech support person is going to know this stuff too,
and if you've used them for a while then they
kind of know. You know, they're going to ask you
these questions like well, what all are you using your
(17:28):
phone for? And they're going to say, are you doing
your banking on there? Are you sending sensitive documents? You
know when you're on the internet, what are you using
the internet for? To try to get an idea as
to what you're doing to then help you pick the
best VPN for you. But you can read here about
the different privacy and security, speed and performance. If you
(17:51):
do streaming, it's going to give you information on streaming,
ease of use, and user experience, a pleasant user experience
the iOS. So the Apple app is an excellent example
of intuitive design. And then I like this here where
it talks about who's it for so newbies. It's easy
(18:14):
to use in full featured, which makes it a great
choice for new virtual private network users. So if you're like,
I don't know if I really want to use a
virtual private network, or I'm not very tech savvy, I
is this going to be really complicated? If this is
a good one for newbies, try out their free version
and see how you like it and get used to it,
(18:35):
and then maybe you want to upgrade to one of
their paid subscriptions, or maybe you're then going to do
some research to determine, based on paid subscriptions what might
work best for you home users. So it gives you
a lot of information, and if you're some tech you
know you're tech savvy, you know you can look down
(18:56):
at some of the specs and configurations. Right, you can
have ten simultaneous connections five hundred plus servers. They're in
one hundred and seventeen different countries. There is a free version.
The free version data limit is unlimited. They block ads
and the nice thing now is you can go right
to Proton VPN reviews and click on Today's best deal
(19:20):
to see what deals they have out there. Now, here's
another one that they said that Nord VPN has the
best premium features. Again, they come down here they tell
you the pros and cons this one. They say, the
antivirus component could be better, it's expensive, and the annual
pricing could be clear. Okay, some people are okay with that.
(19:43):
Maybe they have a different antivirus already enabled that they're
comfortable with that is more secure, so they're not necessarily
interested in the antivirus component of a VPN. But again,
why did they pick this one? For features and capabilities,
speed and performance streaming they're going to give you so,
(20:09):
it says a note here under user experiences, VPN is
positioned as a set it and forget it tool that
we're running the background on your device, which might not
be ideal for everyone. When you don't want the VPN
to automatically connect, then you have to go in and
tap the pause button on the dashboard and mark your
current network is trusted because maybe if you're on your
(20:31):
current network and you know it's a trusted, secure site,
you don't necessarily need to have a VPN. And I
know the VPN that I have, and when I'm on
my home Wi Fi network, I don't use it. I
have one that's not constantly running in the background. So
I go in and make sure that if I'm on
(20:51):
an unsecured site or not site, an unsecured Wi Fi
or one that is password protected. But I'm just not
sure how secure it is because you don't know how
many people have the password to it and can access it.
That I'm going to turn my VPN on. But then
there's some websites that I've tried to access that because
(21:15):
I've had my VPN on, the site won't won't it
won't let me sign in. But if I turn my
VPN off, I can sign in, and I look at
it as the company must then have something in their
software that detects that you're a v that you're using
(21:36):
a VPN, and they have it set to where they
won't allow anybody that's using a VPN to to access
their site, is what I'm thinking. But anyways, and so
I just know that okay, Well, then I'm only going
to access that site when I'm at home on my
secure WiFi. So that could be a reason. You know
(21:59):
why you don't want to VPN running all the time
twenty four to seven in the background. But if you're
one that's constantly on you know, public Wi Fi, unsecured
Wi Fi, and you don't want to take a risk, well,
then maybe having it running twenty four to seven in
the background is the best thing for you. Again, you know,
going in the who it's for frequent travelers. If you
(22:19):
are a frequent traveler and you're using your VPN all
the time, you know, NordVPN has servers in over one
hundred countries, and it's also easy to quickly connect, so
you don't have to worry about snoops on public Wi Fi.
Like we just talked about newbies, it's also good for newbies.
(22:41):
It's easy for first time users to connect immediately. All
of that. So you can go down through all of
these and you can look at all of them like
this one they say is best for location spoofers, right,
so you know you can if I'm in Phoenix, i
can set my v for maybe Miami Florida, or I
(23:02):
can set it for you know, Dallas, Texas. If I'm
out of the country, I can set it for like
if I'm over let's say, in the Caribbean, I can
set it for Miami, Florida, so it thinks I'm in
the United States, which might help with some other sites
that maybe won't allow you to access their site because
(23:24):
they see that you're in a country that they're not
comfortable with, or their site does not operate maybe in
their country in that country. And so it's possible that
if you've set your VPN for maybe Miami, Florida or
back in the United States, that maybe then now this
site will allow you to access it. So you can
(23:49):
also let's go back up to the menu and we
can go down. You can go down in the best
in let's see anti virus software for twenty twenty five.
And again you're going to want to make sure it
says twenty twenty five because that's the most current. Now, yes,
we're at the end of the year. January is rolling around,
So in January and February, look at it and say,
(24:12):
is there one for twenty twenty six January? You know,
I don't know, maybe they haven't updated for anything in
twenty twenty six in January, but you know, look for that.
And if they give you the option of the current year,
always select the current year because it should have the
most up to date information. So look at their top
antivirus pics. Their best overall is a bit Defender. Their
(24:36):
best for extra security features is Norton. Their best breadth
of features is g data cyber defense for speedy scans.
It's malware bites if you're looking for just a single
PC household McAfee is what they're saying, and then scroll
down and do the deeper dive. Right. So the pro
(25:00):
for this bit Defender excellent scores and independent lab tests,
very good defense against fishing, multi layered ransomware protection. They
have an isolated browser for banking safety that might be
something that really means a lot to you. Prevents advertisers
from tracking you. That could be something that you're like,
(25:21):
that is a really high on my list. I don't
want any advertisers tracking me. And it has protection for Windows,
mac Os, Android and iOS. So maybe you know you
have a have an Apple phone, but your devices at
your home are Windows, you know, or vice versa. You
have an Android phone, but you have you have multiple
(25:43):
devices in your home that maybe summer summer Mac and
summer Windows. And I know that was with us when
our kids were still at home. My husband and my
daughter switched to the Mac laptops much quicker than I did.
I was the last one to switch over, but I've
finally did. So we had multiple devices in our home,
(26:03):
and so you know, you'd want to look for one
that you only need one subscription and it's going to
cover all the different devices in there. Again, why they
picked it. You know, it talks about pricing and pricing tiers.
So at fifty dollars a year for one license and
seventy for three Bitdefender costs more than many of its competitors.
(26:27):
Not a lot more, but more so take a look
at how much more you get, though they think it's
still a bargain. They have advanced threat protection that relies
on behavioral moniting to detect malware, including ransomware. So that
behavioral detect monitoring we've talked about that before. That's that's
(26:51):
some more advanced security because it's looking at the behavior
of you know, something that might be considered ransomware or
malware or site, websites or whatever. It's not necessarily looking
specifically for threats that are known out there. They've got
(27:11):
stuff features beyond anti virus, And then again they come
down and say who they think it's for the laid
back user. If you want comprehensive protection with minimal interaction,
simply start Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and enable its autopilot feature.
You can sit back and know that you have comprehensive protection.
(27:33):
But when this says you know you can sit back
and notice it doesn't say you know, not worry or
anything like that. Just know that nothing is one hundred
percent or one hundred and ten percent fool proof. So
you need to know that going into it, and know
that you still need to keep your smart security scam
(27:56):
prevention habits up to date. You know, you still want
to be care full on clicking on links, right, you
want to do all those things, and you want to
look at the r L and see if that ur
L makes sense for that company. You want to make sure,
you know, if you want to look at the cookies
and make sure they're not tracking you. All of that stuff.
You know, you want to keep those scam prevention habits
(28:21):
top of mind. So there's a lot of different things
with the antivirus software. Now you can go up here
and under best products, and you know what else do
they have here? Password managers. You know, it's going to
be interesting to see because they've come out with pass
keys now, and pass keys are that biometric information. And
(28:44):
I've noticed that the password manager that I use will
now when I go to log into some of the
sites that I have, you know, I have all my
my logins in that password manager, it'll prompt me to
set up a pass key, and it saves the pass
key in the past word manager. So you can use
pass keys with password managers as well. You know, you
(29:07):
can look in there and see what they say for
and you can also look here the date. I didn't
say this on the other articles, but this was updated
November sixteenth, so it's it's very recent again here you
know nord Pass best for Beginner's roboform, best premium password manager,
best free password manager, proton pass. So sorry about that.
(29:32):
I've got notifications coming up. But then go down again
to the deeper dive and look at it find out
what they have Like nord Pass, their con is well
they have a limited free plan that might not matter
to you because you know you're already going to pay
for a subscription. Right. They can have email masking, password
health tools. They can help you determine if your passwords
(29:54):
are strong and healthy. They have credit card and email
address breach scans, urgency access. Right again, who's at four
beginners and non tech savvy customers. It's easy to use
individuals and families. Right. If you have a family and
you have kids that are on devices, then you're going
(30:16):
to want to make sure that any of these security
things that you choose includes specific items that relate to
kids that you're going to want to monitor that. It's
going to look out for another company that I've got
I've looked at as cybernews dot com and again same thing.
Go into the menu and you can go down and
(30:41):
they have VPNs, antivirus software, password managers, and so antivirus software,
the best antivirus for twenty five. You can go in
and say, well, I have an iPhone and I want
it just on my iPhone, or I want it for Mac,
or I I'm looking for free, so what's my best
(31:02):
option with free? But let's look I have an iPhone,
so let's look at best anti virus for iPhone and iPads. Again,
this was updated November nineteenth. Again, they're going to give
you you know right here. iPhones, like any other Internet
connected device that uses apps and stores sensitive data, are
(31:23):
vulnerable to viruses. They can damage your device and put
your information at risk. So again, here the best antivirus.
This is their version for the best for iPhones overall.
This bit deefender has a feature rich antivisor antivirus. This
(31:45):
has a reliable antivirus for iPhone with a free version.
This is the best user friendly sweet for an iPhone.
So again, go down. It's going to tell you why
iPhones need antivirus protection right and While it says while
iOS devices like iPhones and iPads are typically more secure
thanks to strong built in security features and strict app
(32:08):
review procedures before they will allow an app on their store,
iPhones are still vulnerable to malware such as adware, malicious toolbars, spyware, trojans, viruses,
so having the trustworthy antivirus software is important. Again, this
is an expert comment, right, Apple's done a great job,
(32:31):
but no system is entirely immune to vulnerabilities. So look,
they've compared here total AV. They've given you the rating
on the app store. What their rating is, the price,
how many devices you can have. So look here, this
one's nineteen a month. You get eight devices. It has
(32:53):
a very light impact in the background Safari web protection,
but it doesn't have a firewall. Okay, this one is
ten dollars eleven dollars more, but you get ten devices,
but it has a firewall, and there's no free version.
This one is what is it twelve dollars more? You
(33:15):
still get well, it's actually more than the total AV
but it's a dollar twenty one more than a month
than the Norton one. And the difference is is get
you get a free version, right, so if you're getting free,
you're not paying for it. But it also has an
app Store rating that's a little higher, you know, point
(33:36):
one higher than this Norton one. But cyber News they're
rating was that it was a little lower than Norton.
So again you've got to read through these. You know,
they're going to tell you the key features. You can
get a seven day free trial, current deal and again
(33:57):
current as of when they printed this article, which was
November nineteenth, And remember that's heading up into black Friday.
So are some of these things that they have here
Black Friday sales? It might be, but you can go
to their website. You know it's it's going to give you.
You can do a smart scan in progress. It'll show it.
(34:19):
Just a lot of different things here at pros and cons. Right,
So this is an interesting con here. Higher prices after
the first year, So that might be a question that
you ask, well, this is how much it is for
the first year, but what's the price for year two
through five? And find out ahead of time. You know,
they should be able to give you a price for
(34:40):
those future years. You know, with the caveat that you
know there could be an it price increase. But and
then maybe you say, well I want to lock in
that lower price. Can I get a three year package
or whatever at that lower price. So it's always good
to have that information. And the pro here it has
a QR code checker. That's great. We've talked a lot
(35:02):
about how QR codes can be malicious, especially the ones
that are sitting out in public where you know they
can put a fake QR code right over top of
it and unless you take your finger and try to
peel it off, you know, you wouldn't know that that
was a sticker on top of the piece of paper.
So just go down through here and do your research research.
(35:26):
You know, this one here, what was the next one
that was Norton? You know they have no unlimited free version.
But this one here has an integrated VPN, So you
get this antivirus. It's got a VPN and that's a
that's a pro because then you don't you don't need
a separate VPN subscription. They monitor the dark web. You
(35:48):
can get a trial version, you know, So just go
down through and and like we've said with this, you
can do your own research and then make a decision.
Or you can do your own research and maybe you've
narrowed it down and then you've talked to your tech
support your trusted tech support person to kind of help
you make that final decision. Or maybe you talk to
(36:11):
your trusted tech support person and they tell you, hey,
this is these are the two or three that I
think would be best for you, and these are the reasons,
and then maybe you go in and do your own research.
You know, again it's up to you and your personal
situation on how you want to handle that. Are you
going to go and get something based off your trusted
(36:32):
tech support person. You're going to do your own research,
you know. But there's a lot of information out there
that's gonna these tech companies that have tech specialists that
constantly review these products, and they will update their articles
with the newest information on there. So that's that's a
(36:54):
good way to look at everything. Let me get back
up to you know, this one here has tools you
could go in and it has a ransom looker, a
website security checker, a strong password generator. Right, so let's
get into that. This is just something that create a
(37:17):
unique password. Right. You can copy the password and then
use it and copy it over into your password manager.
You can generate a new password, but it kind of
helps you figure out what a you know, a strong password.
Let's see what else they have. Personal data leak checker,
(37:37):
password leak checker you can put if you have a
password that you're using, you can put it in there
and they can go through and check and see if
it's has shown up in any leaks. Website security checker.
We've done shows on that. You could put the website
in here and you can check it. It tells you
(37:58):
how it works. So there's a lot of valuable information here.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen now. So that's
a lot of information, I know. But I wanted to
give you examples and different and showing you the two
places that I went to. Now, you might have a
(38:21):
different website that you like to do your research on
tech website that you like to research things. Just go
in and see what technology tools and software programs and
stuff that they do research on. And look at the
date of the most recent article when it was updated,
because you know it might be a great company, but
(38:42):
maybe that's just not what they do is on a
regular basis research all of these softwares, and so you're
looking at an article that might be a year old,
and you know, maybe there's another just as good company
that this they do more of it where they do
the constant updates to these softwares. So just do your research.
(39:03):
I think the biggest takeaway here is don't just buy
something because your friend is using it. You know, some
security software and please don't let someone tell you that, oh,
you have an iPhone, you don't need any additional security.
Yes you do. We've known for a long time that
(39:23):
iOS has very robust security measures and procedures when they
are looking at an app to put an app in
their app store, which is great. Android is catching up.
Android has strong security too, but nothing is fool proof.
Nothing is you know, everything is vulnerable. Anything that is
(39:46):
connected to the Internet is vulnerable. And you have to
understand that before you start doing your research, and know
that when you do find the software and the security
app that you want to use, that doesn't mean sit
back and forget about all your scam prevention habits. You
(40:07):
need to keep your scam prevention habits in place, your
healthy skepticism, knowing it it's okay to ask questions when
you don't understand why they're asking for certain information. You know,
keep your healthy habits about, you know, clicking on links
and responding to messages that you have no idea who
this person is. You know, it's okay to hang up
(40:30):
if you realize you shouldn't have answered that phone call,
It's okay to hang up. You know a lot of
different scam prevention habits, verifying everything before you can even
begin to trust.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
All.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Right, next week, I believe we're going to be talking
about We've gotten some new text messages in from people
and We're going to show you some different emails that
have been coming through to give you an update on that,
and so stay stay tuned next week for that information.
(41:04):
One of the text messages is really clever on the
link that the scammer was using, So you're going to
want to tune in and find out what that what
that link was. It's really clever. Anyways, maybe you have
a text message or an email that you've gotten that
you know as a scam, send it to us. You know,
we want to see this, you know, screenshot it and
(41:25):
send it. Or if you want to forward the email message,
that's fine. You can forward it to info at Roseadvocacy
dot org or screenshot it and send it to us.
You can screenshot the text and email it over to
us as well. It's info at Roseadvocacy dot org. So
that's it for today. I hope you got a lot
(41:46):
of valuable information and please, please please do your research
and have that trusted tech support person to talk to
about the best security apps for all of your devices,
including your mobile phones, your cell phone. They are not
immune to vulnerabilities, and don't forget you're going to want
to visit our website Roseadvocacy dot org find all of
(42:08):
our social media links. We are really trying to grow
our YouTube page, so we would love it if you
would subscribe to that YouTube page. We're trying to get
up over one hundred subscribers. To unlock some more tools there,
and then scroll down to the bottom of the page.
We have our newsletters you can sign up for. As
I said in the beginning, there's an email one. There
(42:28):
is a mailed one email one. If you're already on it,
you would have gotten our Tuesday tip about a half
hour ago. Every Tuesday morning, a Tuesday tip comes out.
Great conversation starter to talk to your loved ones to
keep scam prevention a regular conversation in a just conversational tone,
(42:49):
not making someone defensive, not a negative tone. It's having
the conversation. The more we talk about this, the more
we can help people and ourselves with scam prevention and
be a lot healthier, keep our nest egg when we retire,
to be able to live out our retirement years the
way we want to live out, to be a lot
(43:10):
more educated and aware about what's going on. All right,
thanks for joining me and see you next week.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode June in
every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio
at KFOURHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge,
so you have the power to make scam protection your
healthy habit, and until then, feel free to reach out
to Joyce and let's talk about scams.
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek
(00:22):
the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any
suggested ideas in The information contained in this podcast is
intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute
for individual professional legal advice. The podcast information was carefully
compiled from vetted sources and references. However, Rose resources outreach
(00:44):
to safeguard the elderly cannot guarantee that you will not
fall victim to a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's
the must listen show for anyone who wants to protect
themselves and their loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday am
Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder
(01:05):
of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and
practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams.
And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Hi, everyone, welcome back, to let's talk about scams. I'm
Joyce Petrowski, founder and board president of Rose Resources Outreach
to Safeguard the elderly. You can find more information on
our website at Roseadvocacy dot org. On the homepage you'll
find all of our social media channels Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube,
(01:41):
and you're going to want to subscribe to the YouTube
channels so you don't miss an episode of this show.
We have all of our past episodes on there, and
the shorts are on there as well. If you scroll
down to the bottom of that page, you will find
you can sign up for our newsletters. We send one
(02:03):
in the mail at the beginning of every month, and
we do one via email, and the larger email newsletter
goes out at the beginning of every month. December's went
out last Friday, December fifth. But every Tuesday morning at
nine fifteen, you're going to get a Tuesday Tip, and
that Tuesday tip is one to give you information that
(02:25):
you might not have known or even if you did
know the information. The second and more important part of
it is it's a reminder. It's a reminder to keep
scam prevention top of mind so you keep your healthy skepticism,
your healthy scam prevention habits, So the next time you
are contacted by a scammer, you're going to be more
(02:47):
apt to think scam and then know the steps to
go through to determine if it really is a scam,
to verify before you can trust it, talk to your
trusted person about the situation. Different things like that, So
you're going to you can sign up for one or
you can sign up for both of them. It's a
way to get some great information. And another great thing
(03:08):
about the Tuesday Tip or even our mailed newsletter or
the larger emailed newsletter is it's going to give you
information that you can use as a conversation starter. You
can take this information. You can talk to your older
loved ones in regular conversation. You know, it doesn't have
to be a conversation where you're like, don't do this,
(03:31):
don't do that, don't do this. You can use it
to say, hey, you know, I just learned about this
new protection tool. I just learned about this new scam
that's been going around. Did you know about it? You know,
have you received any of these text messages or phone
calls or it's a way to keep that conversation going
(03:51):
and it lets your older loved one also know that, Hey,
you can come talk to me. You know, if you
do happen to click on a link or respond to
a text message, or maybe you've given your credit card
number out and then realized you think it might be
a scam, come talk to me about it, and I
can help you mitigate the damages. And you know I
(04:11):
can help you if it's identity theft, we can work
through the process of getting your identity back. Anyways, lots
of great information and lots of great ways you can
use this information. So today we're going to talk about
securing your cell phones. I think just about everybody has
(04:33):
a cell phone these days, and the majority of the
cell phones are connected to the internet. We do a
lot of stuff on our cell phones. I think we
just automatically go to our cell phones to do things
versus going to our laptop or our desktop or iPad
or anything like that. You know, big reason is your
(04:54):
cell phone's the most portable thing, right instead of carrying
around a bulky laptop or a bigger iPad, your cell
phone's portable. You might have it in your purse, your
back pocket. You know, your your briefcase, you know, whatever
it is that you're carrying, and so you know, we're
on it all the time, you know, whether we're talking
(05:16):
on the phone, or we're texting, or we're checking our emails,
or we're searching for something online. With the holidays coming up,
you know, we might be on it to search for
Christmas gifts, for holiday gifts. You know, you might be
on social media on there. There's a wide variety of
social media apps out there, and a lot of people
(05:38):
do their banking right. A lot of, if not all
of the banks have their app where you can do
your banking on your phone. Right, somebody gives you a check,
because yes, there are still people out there that write checks.
I'm one of them. I'm sure there's a lot of
people out there. Don't necessar sarely write checks for everything,
(06:01):
but we do still write checks for certain things. And
if someone hands you a check, you know a lot
of times people aren't going to take time out to
have to go to the bank and stand in line
and do all that to make that deposit. So they're
going to do a deposit right on their phone. And
maybe they want to check their banking activity or they
(06:22):
want to check their banking balance or you know, their
credit card activity, or transfer money between accounts, you know whatever.
A lot of times we pick up our phones to
do that. And I also think we're good at for
the most part, we're good at securing our desktop computers,
(06:43):
our laptop, our iPads, because I think we think of
those more as computers. But we really need to think
of our cell phones as mobile computers. With everything that
can be done on the cell phones and that that
is done on the cell phones, we have to lock
down and secure our cell phones or our mobile computers.
(07:08):
We have a short video that's going to be coming out,
I believe next week. I believe it might be the
Tip Tuesday for next week. It's a short little video
that I did about you need to secure your cell phones.
You need to treat them as mobile computers. So, and
another thing that I've heard is from people is well,
I have an iPhone and I've been told I don't
(07:30):
need any added security, that it's enough. Well, nothing is
full proof. So iPhones are not full proof. Android phones
are not full proof. They are susceptible to being hacked into.
They are susceptible to not catch you know, every malicious
(07:52):
site that's out there. So having added security measures on
your phone, whether it's an iPhone or an Android, is
the thing that you can do. Now you might ask, well,
what security should I have? Right, Well, that's a that's
a question that looks different to really everybody because we're
(08:14):
all different. What we do on our phones is different,
what risk we like to take, our risk tolerance level
is different as well. Our convenience what we see is
trading convenience for risk is different. So that's why it's
good to do some research. Now. One of the tips
that we give out is, you know, we always talk
(08:36):
about be aware of your emotions, have a trusted person
you can talk to about anything you want to verify
before you can even begin to trust. Be careful of
you know, payment options, and you know, guard your personal information.
But another just as important tip is having that go
to tech support person. And we've talked about this a lot.
(08:59):
There are companies out there that provide this tech support.
Some of them might only do commercial you know, properties,
so they might be if you know, work for might
be contracted with your employer to do all of their
cybersecurity and lock down all of the company's uh computers
and and and software and all of that stuff. But
(09:23):
they might also have a consumer part of it where
they work with individuals and homes and your mobile computers
and your your mobile phones and your personal devices. There's
a lot of you know, individual people out there, whether
they've set up a company or not. They're really good
(09:45):
tech support people and a lot of times they can
help you with your devices by remoting into your device.
Now you have to allow that to happen, which is
why you need to trust this person that they are
are only going to do what you've asked them to do.
And when they say they've disconnected, they've disconnected the line
(10:10):
of them remoting the session that they've actually disconnected it
and they've not left anything in the background right that
they're watching everything you do, like a malicious site might do,
or a virus on your computer or something like that.
So that's why you need to have a trusted one.
But a lot of times these tech support people they
(10:31):
also know cell phones. Some of them might know both
Android and iPhones. Some of them might specialize in Android
where others will specialize in iPhones. But it's a good
question to ask because they know a lot of these
softwares that you can get and what works best for iPhones,
(10:52):
and they've maybe through experience, but they've done a lot
of this research. But if you want to do the
research on your own, I'm going to share my screen
now and kind of walk you through some stuff that
I was looking at. And uh so you can hang
on a second. There we go, so you can kind
(11:13):
of see how we you know, when we say to
do your research. So you know, there's a lot of
great companies out there, tech companies that will evaluate a
bunch of different softwares and apps and stuff like that,
(11:35):
and they continually monitor and evaluate these apps, and then
they update their articles quite frequently with new information. And
so one of the one of the tech companies that
we've used quite frequently for different information is PC Magazine.
(11:56):
And so basically I've just got into this PCMag dot
com and I come over here to the menu, and
I scrolled down and there's how to reviews comparisons best products.
So I just went into best products and you can
go down through here and you can scroll and you
can see all the best products. But if you're looking
for a monitor, a printer, some gaming or graphics, video editing,
(12:20):
web hosting. There's password managers, antivirus software, robot vacuums, headphones, TVs,
all kinds of stuff. Wi Fi's the best phones, external
hard drives, but the one I pulled up was the
best VPN services for twenty twenty five. And so that's
the virtual private network, which is what we recommend in
(12:43):
our resource packet and in our presentations. We recommend that
if your only option is to be on public Wi Fi,
even if it's password protective, public Wi Fi, that's not
as secure as maybe the Wi Fi you have at
your home. And why would even though both of them
(13:05):
are password protected, why would the other one not be
as secure as yours? Well, like a hotel, right, their
wifis password protected, but how many people know that password
and how often do they change it? Right? So, even
if they change it every day, the people that are
staying in there that day know the password. And if
(13:26):
there's a thousand people in there, there's a thousand people
that know that password, and are ten of them or
five of them or one of them, you know a
criminal that's just trying to get in and using that
password protected Wi Fi to get into anybody that's on
that Wi Fi. So and even you know, coffee shops
(13:46):
and different things like that, even if it's their wifi's
password protected, you have to ask yourself the question how
many people know that password? And then you need to
make the decision do you think this is really secure?
Or are you going to protect yourself and use a
virtual private network when you are using the internet while
(14:07):
you're connected to their WiFi. Now, you know, you could say, well,
what harm is it if I'm checking the weather, right,
you know something like that, if I'm using public Wi Fi. Well,
if you're checking the weather, okay, it's you know not,
you wouldn't think that. You would think that's pretty harmless.
But you know what if there's a fake weather site
(14:30):
out there that the criminals have cloned, and by you
getting on that website, they're now installing malware. You know,
I don't know. I'm just, for lack of a better term,
trying to be the devil's advocate here to try to
get people to think more about what they're doing online
and are they really protected. So the virtual private networks
(14:53):
are going to really help with this. They're going to
encrypt your information that you're doing. You can also use
your person sal hotspot on your phones. But this company
here has gone through and they have and evaluated a
bunch of different virtual private networks, and you can look
(15:16):
and like their best overall pick is Proton VPN, and
you can expand it here and look at the pros
and cons. Okay, best free plan we've seen, industry leading
privacy standards. They have a global server network, numerous additional
privacy tools, they have ample customer support. You can also
(15:37):
look at the cons. Now, your tech support person is
going to be able to tell you what high latency
scores and testing is. But you can also scroll all
the way down and take a deeper dive into their
top tested picks. So you can go down here and
they're going to say, give you some more information. Earns
(15:58):
a five star rating. While the core paid VPN service
price is average, they have the best free VPN subscription
we've seen. Now a lot of times we tell you
stay away from free services because they don't have a
lot of the security measures that you really should have.
But we also understand not everybody's budget allows them to
(16:21):
pay for all of these different services, and so a
free VPN service might be what your budget allows and
what you need, and a free one is better than
not having anything at all. So this one PC magazine
has determined has the best free subscription. Now you can
(16:46):
look at you know, open this up. Well why did
they pick it? Well, they said an additional to the
usual VPN capabilities, there's an AD blocker, a kill switch,
a malware blocker, port forwardings, split tunneling, some of these things.
You know, you might have to look up what does
split tunneling mean? Or maybe you just get the customer
(17:07):
service number and you call them and say, hey, what
is split tunneling? How's that going to benefit me? You know,
what's support forwarding and how does that benefit me? But
your tech support person is going to know this stuff too,
and if you've used them for a while then they
kind of know. You know, they're going to ask you
these questions like well, what all are you using your
(17:28):
phone for? And they're going to say, are you doing
your banking on there? Are you sending sensitive documents? You
know when you're on the internet, what are you using
the internet for? To try to get an idea as
to what you're doing to then help you pick the
best VPN for you. But you can read here about
the different privacy and security, speed and performance. If you
(17:51):
do streaming, it's going to give you information on streaming,
ease of use, and user experience, a pleasant user experience
the iOS. So the Apple app is an excellent example
of intuitive design. And then I like this here where
it talks about who's it for so newbies. It's easy
(18:14):
to use in full featured, which makes it a great
choice for new virtual private network users. So if you're like,
I don't know if I really want to use a
virtual private network, or I'm not very tech savvy, I
is this going to be really complicated? If this is
a good one for newbies, try out their free version
and see how you like it and get used to it,
(18:35):
and then maybe you want to upgrade to one of
their paid subscriptions, or maybe you're then going to do
some research to determine, based on paid subscriptions what might
work best for you home users. So it gives you
a lot of information, and if you're some tech you
know you're tech savvy, you know you can look down
(18:56):
at some of the specs and configurations. Right, you can
have ten simultaneous connections five hundred plus servers. They're in
one hundred and seventeen different countries. There is a free version.
The free version data limit is unlimited. They block ads
and the nice thing now is you can go right
to Proton VPN reviews and click on Today's best deal
(19:20):
to see what deals they have out there. Now, here's
another one that they said that Nord VPN has the
best premium features. Again, they come down here they tell
you the pros and cons this one. They say, the
antivirus component could be better, it's expensive, and the annual
pricing could be clear. Okay, some people are okay with that.
(19:43):
Maybe they have a different antivirus already enabled that they're
comfortable with that is more secure, so they're not necessarily
interested in the antivirus component of a VPN. But again,
why did they pick this one? For features and capabilities,
speed and performance streaming they're going to give you so,
(20:09):
it says a note here under user experiences, VPN is
positioned as a set it and forget it tool that
we're running the background on your device, which might not
be ideal for everyone. When you don't want the VPN
to automatically connect, then you have to go in and
tap the pause button on the dashboard and mark your
current network is trusted because maybe if you're on your
(20:31):
current network and you know it's a trusted, secure site,
you don't necessarily need to have a VPN. And I
know the VPN that I have, and when I'm on
my home Wi Fi network, I don't use it. I
have one that's not constantly running in the background. So
I go in and make sure that if I'm on
(20:51):
an unsecured site or not site, an unsecured Wi Fi
or one that is password protected. But I'm just not
sure how secure it is because you don't know how
many people have the password to it and can access it.
That I'm going to turn my VPN on. But then
there's some websites that I've tried to access that because
(21:15):
I've had my VPN on, the site won't won't it
won't let me sign in. But if I turn my
VPN off, I can sign in, and I look at
it as the company must then have something in their
software that detects that you're a v that you're using
(21:36):
a VPN, and they have it set to where they
won't allow anybody that's using a VPN to to access
their site, is what I'm thinking. But anyways, and so
I just know that okay, Well, then I'm only going
to access that site when I'm at home on my
secure WiFi. So that could be a reason. You know
(21:59):
why you don't want to VPN running all the time
twenty four to seven in the background. But if you're
one that's constantly on you know, public Wi Fi, unsecured
Wi Fi, and you don't want to take a risk, well,
then maybe having it running twenty four to seven in
the background is the best thing for you. Again, you know,
going in the who it's for frequent travelers. If you
(22:19):
are a frequent traveler and you're using your VPN all
the time, you know, NordVPN has servers in over one
hundred countries, and it's also easy to quickly connect, so
you don't have to worry about snoops on public Wi Fi.
Like we just talked about newbies, it's also good for newbies.
(22:41):
It's easy for first time users to connect immediately. All
of that. So you can go down through all of
these and you can look at all of them like
this one they say is best for location spoofers, right,
so you know you can if I'm in Phoenix, i
can set my v for maybe Miami Florida, or I
(23:02):
can set it for you know, Dallas, Texas. If I'm
out of the country, I can set it for like
if I'm over let's say, in the Caribbean, I can
set it for Miami, Florida, so it thinks I'm in
the United States, which might help with some other sites
that maybe won't allow you to access their site because
(23:24):
they see that you're in a country that they're not
comfortable with, or their site does not operate maybe in
their country in that country. And so it's possible that
if you've set your VPN for maybe Miami, Florida or
back in the United States, that maybe then now this
site will allow you to access it. So you can
(23:49):
also let's go back up to the menu and we
can go down. You can go down in the best
in let's see anti virus software for twenty twenty five.
And again you're going to want to make sure it
says twenty twenty five because that's the most current. Now, yes,
we're at the end of the year. January is rolling around,
So in January and February, look at it and say,
(24:12):
is there one for twenty twenty six January? You know,
I don't know, maybe they haven't updated for anything in
twenty twenty six in January, but you know, look for that.
And if they give you the option of the current year,
always select the current year because it should have the
most up to date information. So look at their top
antivirus pics. Their best overall is a bit Defender. Their
(24:36):
best for extra security features is Norton. Their best breadth
of features is g data cyber defense for speedy scans.
It's malware bites if you're looking for just a single
PC household McAfee is what they're saying, and then scroll
down and do the deeper dive. Right. So the pro
(25:00):
for this bit Defender excellent scores and independent lab tests,
very good defense against fishing, multi layered ransomware protection. They
have an isolated browser for banking safety that might be
something that really means a lot to you. Prevents advertisers
from tracking you. That could be something that you're like,
(25:21):
that is a really high on my list. I don't
want any advertisers tracking me. And it has protection for Windows,
mac Os, Android and iOS. So maybe you know you
have a have an Apple phone, but your devices at
your home are Windows, you know, or vice versa. You
have an Android phone, but you have you have multiple
(25:43):
devices in your home that maybe summer summer Mac and
summer Windows. And I know that was with us when
our kids were still at home. My husband and my
daughter switched to the Mac laptops much quicker than I did.
I was the last one to switch over, but I've
finally did. So we had multiple devices in our home,
(26:03):
and so you know, you'd want to look for one
that you only need one subscription and it's going to
cover all the different devices in there. Again, why they
picked it. You know, it talks about pricing and pricing tiers.
So at fifty dollars a year for one license and
seventy for three Bitdefender costs more than many of its competitors.
(26:27):
Not a lot more, but more so take a look
at how much more you get, though they think it's
still a bargain. They have advanced threat protection that relies
on behavioral moniting to detect malware, including ransomware. So that
behavioral detect monitoring we've talked about that before. That's that's
(26:51):
some more advanced security because it's looking at the behavior
of you know, something that might be considered ransomware or
malware or site, websites or whatever. It's not necessarily looking
specifically for threats that are known out there. They've got
(27:11):
stuff features beyond anti virus, And then again they come
down and say who they think it's for the laid
back user. If you want comprehensive protection with minimal interaction,
simply start Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and enable its autopilot feature.
You can sit back and know that you have comprehensive protection.
(27:33):
But when this says you know you can sit back
and notice it doesn't say you know, not worry or
anything like that. Just know that nothing is one hundred
percent or one hundred and ten percent fool proof. So
you need to know that going into it, and know
that you still need to keep your smart security scam
(27:56):
prevention habits up to date. You know, you still want
to be care full on clicking on links, right, you
want to do all those things, and you want to
look at the r L and see if that ur
L makes sense for that company. You want to make sure,
you know, if you want to look at the cookies
and make sure they're not tracking you. All of that stuff.
You know, you want to keep those scam prevention habits
(28:21):
top of mind. So there's a lot of different things
with the antivirus software. Now you can go up here
and under best products, and you know what else do
they have here? Password managers. You know, it's going to
be interesting to see because they've come out with pass
keys now, and pass keys are that biometric information. And
(28:44):
I've noticed that the password manager that I use will
now when I go to log into some of the
sites that I have, you know, I have all my
my logins in that password manager, it'll prompt me to
set up a pass key, and it saves the pass
key in the past word manager. So you can use
pass keys with password managers as well. You know, you
(29:07):
can look in there and see what they say for
and you can also look here the date. I didn't
say this on the other articles, but this was updated
November sixteenth, so it's it's very recent again here you
know nord Pass best for Beginner's roboform, best premium password manager,
best free password manager, proton pass. So sorry about that.
(29:32):
I've got notifications coming up. But then go down again
to the deeper dive and look at it find out
what they have Like nord Pass, their con is well
they have a limited free plan that might not matter
to you because you know you're already going to pay
for a subscription. Right. They can have email masking, password
health tools. They can help you determine if your passwords
(29:54):
are strong and healthy. They have credit card and email
address breach scans, urgency access. Right again, who's at four
beginners and non tech savvy customers. It's easy to use
individuals and families. Right. If you have a family and
you have kids that are on devices, then you're going
(30:16):
to want to make sure that any of these security
things that you choose includes specific items that relate to
kids that you're going to want to monitor that. It's
going to look out for another company that I've got
I've looked at as cybernews dot com and again same thing.
Go into the menu and you can go down and
(30:41):
they have VPNs, antivirus software, password managers, and so antivirus software,
the best antivirus for twenty five. You can go in
and say, well, I have an iPhone and I want
it just on my iPhone, or I want it for Mac,
or I I'm looking for free, so what's my best
(31:02):
option with free? But let's look I have an iPhone,
so let's look at best anti virus for iPhone and iPads. Again,
this was updated November nineteenth. Again, they're going to give
you you know right here. iPhones, like any other Internet
connected device that uses apps and stores sensitive data, are
(31:23):
vulnerable to viruses. They can damage your device and put
your information at risk. So again, here the best antivirus.
This is their version for the best for iPhones overall.
This bit deefender has a feature rich antivisor antivirus. This
(31:45):
has a reliable antivirus for iPhone with a free version.
This is the best user friendly sweet for an iPhone.
So again, go down. It's going to tell you why
iPhones need antivirus protection right and While it says while
iOS devices like iPhones and iPads are typically more secure
thanks to strong built in security features and strict app
(32:08):
review procedures before they will allow an app on their store,
iPhones are still vulnerable to malware such as adware, malicious toolbars, spyware, trojans, viruses,
so having the trustworthy antivirus software is important. Again, this
is an expert comment, right, Apple's done a great job,
(32:31):
but no system is entirely immune to vulnerabilities. So look,
they've compared here total AV. They've given you the rating
on the app store. What their rating is, the price,
how many devices you can have. So look here, this
one's nineteen a month. You get eight devices. It has
(32:53):
a very light impact in the background Safari web protection,
but it doesn't have a firewall. Okay, this one is
ten dollars eleven dollars more, but you get ten devices,
but it has a firewall, and there's no free version.
This one is what is it twelve dollars more? You
(33:15):
still get well, it's actually more than the total AV
but it's a dollar twenty one more than a month
than the Norton one. And the difference is is get
you get a free version, right, so if you're getting free,
you're not paying for it. But it also has an
app Store rating that's a little higher, you know, point
(33:36):
one higher than this Norton one. But cyber News they're
rating was that it was a little lower than Norton.
So again you've got to read through these. You know,
they're going to tell you the key features. You can
get a seven day free trial, current deal and again
(33:57):
current as of when they printed this article, which was
November nineteenth, And remember that's heading up into black Friday.
So are some of these things that they have here
Black Friday sales? It might be, but you can go
to their website. You know it's it's going to give you.
You can do a smart scan in progress. It'll show it.
(34:19):
Just a lot of different things here at pros and cons. Right,
So this is an interesting con here. Higher prices after
the first year, So that might be a question that
you ask, well, this is how much it is for
the first year, but what's the price for year two
through five? And find out ahead of time. You know,
they should be able to give you a price for
(34:40):
those future years. You know, with the caveat that you
know there could be an it price increase. But and
then maybe you say, well I want to lock in
that lower price. Can I get a three year package
or whatever at that lower price. So it's always good
to have that information. And the pro here it has
a QR code checker. That's great. We've talked a lot
(35:02):
about how QR codes can be malicious, especially the ones
that are sitting out in public where you know they
can put a fake QR code right over top of
it and unless you take your finger and try to
peel it off, you know, you wouldn't know that that
was a sticker on top of the piece of paper.
So just go down through here and do your research research.
(35:26):
You know, this one here, what was the next one
that was Norton? You know they have no unlimited free version.
But this one here has an integrated VPN, So you
get this antivirus. It's got a VPN and that's a
that's a pro because then you don't you don't need
a separate VPN subscription. They monitor the dark web. You
(35:48):
can get a trial version, you know, So just go
down through and and like we've said with this, you
can do your own research and then make a decision.
Or you can do your own research and maybe you've
narrowed it down and then you've talked to your tech
support your trusted tech support person to kind of help
you make that final decision. Or maybe you talk to
(36:11):
your trusted tech support person and they tell you, hey,
this is these are the two or three that I
think would be best for you, and these are the reasons,
and then maybe you go in and do your own research.
You know, again it's up to you and your personal
situation on how you want to handle that. Are you
going to go and get something based off your trusted
(36:32):
tech support person. You're going to do your own research,
you know. But there's a lot of information out there
that's gonna these tech companies that have tech specialists that
constantly review these products, and they will update their articles
with the newest information on there. So that's that's a
(36:54):
good way to look at everything. Let me get back
up to you know, this one here has tools you
could go in and it has a ransom looker, a
website security checker, a strong password generator. Right, so let's
get into that. This is just something that create a
(37:17):
unique password. Right. You can copy the password and then
use it and copy it over into your password manager.
You can generate a new password, but it kind of
helps you figure out what a you know, a strong password.
Let's see what else they have. Personal data leak checker,
(37:37):
password leak checker you can put if you have a
password that you're using, you can put it in there
and they can go through and check and see if
it's has shown up in any leaks. Website security checker.
We've done shows on that. You could put the website
in here and you can check it. It tells you
(37:58):
how it works. So there's a lot of valuable information here.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen now. So that's
a lot of information, I know. But I wanted to
give you examples and different and showing you the two
places that I went to. Now, you might have a
(38:21):
different website that you like to do your research on
tech website that you like to research things. Just go
in and see what technology tools and software programs and
stuff that they do research on. And look at the
date of the most recent article when it was updated,
because you know it might be a great company, but
(38:42):
maybe that's just not what they do is on a
regular basis research all of these softwares, and so you're
looking at an article that might be a year old,
and you know, maybe there's another just as good company
that this they do more of it where they do
the constant updates to these softwares. So just do your research.
(39:03):
I think the biggest takeaway here is don't just buy
something because your friend is using it. You know, some
security software and please don't let someone tell you that, oh,
you have an iPhone, you don't need any additional security.
Yes you do. We've known for a long time that
(39:23):
iOS has very robust security measures and procedures when they
are looking at an app to put an app in
their app store, which is great. Android is catching up.
Android has strong security too, but nothing is fool proof.
Nothing is you know, everything is vulnerable. Anything that is
(39:46):
connected to the Internet is vulnerable. And you have to
understand that before you start doing your research, and know
that when you do find the software and the security
app that you want to use, that doesn't mean sit
back and forget about all your scam prevention habits. You
(40:07):
need to keep your scam prevention habits in place, your
healthy skepticism, knowing it it's okay to ask questions when
you don't understand why they're asking for certain information. You know,
keep your healthy habits about, you know, clicking on links
and responding to messages that you have no idea who
this person is. You know, it's okay to hang up
(40:30):
if you realize you shouldn't have answered that phone call,
It's okay to hang up. You know a lot of
different scam prevention habits, verifying everything before you can even
begin to trust.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
All.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Right, next week, I believe we're going to be talking
about We've gotten some new text messages in from people
and We're going to show you some different emails that
have been coming through to give you an update on that,
and so stay stay tuned next week for that information.
(41:04):
One of the text messages is really clever on the
link that the scammer was using, So you're going to
want to tune in and find out what that what
that link was. It's really clever. Anyways, maybe you have
a text message or an email that you've gotten that
you know as a scam, send it to us. You know,
we want to see this, you know, screenshot it and
(41:25):
send it. Or if you want to forward the email message,
that's fine. You can forward it to info at Roseadvocacy
dot org or screenshot it and send it to us.
You can screenshot the text and email it over to
us as well. It's info at Roseadvocacy dot org. So
that's it for today. I hope you got a lot
(41:46):
of valuable information and please, please please do your research
and have that trusted tech support person to talk to
about the best security apps for all of your devices,
including your mobile phones, your cell phone. They are not
immune to vulnerabilities, and don't forget you're going to want
to visit our website Roseadvocacy dot org find all of
(42:08):
our social media links. We are really trying to grow
our YouTube page, so we would love it if you
would subscribe to that YouTube page. We're trying to get
up over one hundred subscribers. To unlock some more tools there,
and then scroll down to the bottom of the page.
We have our newsletters you can sign up for. As
I said in the beginning, there's an email one. There
(42:28):
is a mailed one email one. If you're already on it,
you would have gotten our Tuesday tip about a half
hour ago. Every Tuesday morning, a Tuesday tip comes out.
Great conversation starter to talk to your loved ones to
keep scam prevention a regular conversation in a just conversational tone,
(42:49):
not making someone defensive, not a negative tone. It's having
the conversation. The more we talk about this, the more
we can help people and ourselves with scam prevention and
be a lot healthier, keep our nest egg when we retire,
to be able to live out our retirement years the
way we want to live out, to be a lot
(43:10):
more educated and aware about what's going on. All right,
thanks for joining me and see you next week.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode June in
every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio
at KFOURHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge,
so you have the power to make scam protection your
healthy habit, and until then, feel free to reach out
to Joyce and let's talk about scams.
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