Question & answer

What is phishing and does antivirus stop it?

The short answer

Phishing uses fake messages and websites to trick you into entering passwords or payment details. Good security suites block many known phishing sites in your browser. New scams appear faster than blocklists can keep up, though. Your own caution and a password manager remain the strongest defense.

In detail

Phishing does more damage than viruses these days. It targets the person rather than the machine. Think of an email that looks like your bank or a text about a parcel delivery. A fake login page can look exactly like the real one. There is no file to scan. You hand over the keys yourself.

Security suites help at the edges. The web protection in Bitdefender, Norton and F-Secure blocks known phishing sites before the page loads. Banking modes isolate your browser during payments. Trend Micro’s Pay Guard and F-Secure’s banking protection do this. That is genuinely useful, but it is always one step behind brand-new campaigns.

The strongest defenses are other tools. A password manager will not fill in your password on a fake domain. That makes even a convincing phishing page easy to spot. Two-factor authentication means a stolen password alone is not enough. The best habit of all is to never log in through a link in a message. Open the site or app yourself. Antivirus then works as a safety net behind those habits.