Security software companies more and more prey on people’s fear to help sell more products. This shady marketing practice is commonly known as FUD which stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They tend to over-inflate threats to scare people into buying their product, usually through their studies showing startling statistics. These reports are fed to reporters, many whom post the information without any further investigation, helping to feed the frenzy. Many security software firms rely on the fact that
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain
VPNs aside, one good example of such scare tactics revolves around mobile anti-virus products. I have written about the mobile anti-virus myth before regarding how these apps do very little to protect you, and in fact, in many cases, they decrease the performance and battery life of your phone. These applications do primary signature-based detection of applications but are not able to do heuristic detection, which means they cannot protect you from zero-day attacks, by the time the malicious app is detected