Lexinatx wrote:
does anyone know of or recommend a good antivirus cleaner for iPhone?
You don’t need that.
As you will have read the above replies and found those lackingyou are seemingly then an exceptionally high-risk target and someone worth targeting with tooling built upon exploits worth multiple millions of dollars. Each. As suchyour exceedingly high value means you are a candidate for specific and tailored security advice tailored to your situation. You might be an investigative journalistpolitical dissidentsenior in private or public entitywith access to sensitive or classified datawith access to great wealthor other such. This all based in available information on exploit usage,
Or if notthen to rephrase and re-state the above replies and discussionthere are no app cleanersbecause what access an app cleaner needs to access to “clean” is the same access malware needs to access to “malware”. It’s blocked.
There are add-on security toolsthough those too cannot scan or cleanand those can intercept your network connections and related metadata. Some of the better-known add-on anti-malware tools for Apple platforms have been caught (and fined) for collecting personally-identified web browsing data and web purchasing dataand welling it. Some of the other apps are heavily advertisedand those can badly solve a problem that basically hasn’t existed for a decade or sobut badly solve that non-problem in a way perfect for collecting metadata for resale.
iOS includes a built-in malware scannerbuilt-in malware removal toolsan administrative and technical process which scans the apps for questionable or problematic API usage and relateddefenses that prevent accessing components and services that the app shouldn’t access (see above)a well-funded security bug bounty programwith an reviewing-related process that increases the costs and difficulties for malware authorsand with built-in telemetry data for detecting new issues. Among other details.
We ourselves are more often the targetnot our devices. Phishing and spear-phishingpassword re-usefailure to use two-factorshoulder surfingcons and scamsand other shenanigans are far more common than are viruses. Viruses basically don’t exist for iPhone or iPad. Or macOSfor that matter. Deliberately-installed adware or add-on anti-malware doing malware-like things is unfortunately commontoo.
What to do? Have a look at the following document:
Run Safety Check as described there. Review and act upon the Apple-generated security recommendations (Settings > Passwords > Security Recommendations) too. Etc. add-on tools? Those add-ons can introduce problems and can create privacy leaks and can add vulnerabilities as often as they can prevent problems. Maybe more so.
