KCinCan wrote:
Thank you. What do you mean by first-few-hops VPN?
First-few-hops VPNs are overhyped solutions to a problem that hasn’t existed for a decade, but are perfected.y designed and positioned to collect personally-identifiable metadata.
I use Bitfender. I take it you do not think a third-party anti-malware program is necessary or even all that good. It can cause problems iOS?
Add-on anti-malware cannot scan an iOS device, but it can collect network metadata.
And to be clear, a Mac mini as mentioned in the original posting here runs macOS, and not iOS.
On macOS, add-on anti-malware can tie in more tightly, and more intrusively, but is not significantly better than the built-in anti-malware. It can be significantly worse.
One of the more amusing outcomes of the built-in anti-malware in macOS has been its blocking of the add-on anti-malware efforts toward corrupting macOS, as the add-on anti-malware apps cannot modify macOS itself.
In one case reported around here, the add-on anti-malware mis-detected the built-in anti-malware as malware, and the built-in won that one.
Basically, the add-ons introduce as many or more issues as they resolve. And when things are wonky or crashing, add-on anti-malware and other add-on “security” tools are a potential culprit. There have been other mis-detections reported, such as one in a boot cache.
More subtly, add-on anti-malware can introduce vulnerabilities. Some of the add-ons security tools are simply atrociously badly designed and coded, and vaeious of these have themselves been targeted for exploits.
When things get weird and crashy, simplify the configuration.
