Small Office, Home Office Information |
| Small Business Computer Security It still appals me just how many small business people have absolutely no idea about how to protect their computers. I’m not talking about protecting them from theft but about the damage that comes from inadvertently downloading trojans or viruses. Quite often when we’re down at our friend’s computer shop we see at least one small business person come in with their computer tucked under their arm to have it fixed. It might be running slow or they can no longer connect to the net and sometimes if they can connect they find that their browser has been hijacked and they can’t get to the sites that they want to see. Invariably a quick scan of the machine turns up some virus or trojan and the owner of the computer is completely mystified as to how it might have got there. They instantly throw up their hands and say that they have never been to a site that might have downloaded something like that to their machine. It’s quite obvious that they are trying to say that they have never been to an adult site because they are the only ones that could possibly do such terrible things to their machines. And sometimes they are genuine, they really haven’t been visiting any naughty sites but that doesn’t matter one little bit. It’s not just adult sites that can drop those nasty things on your machines. There are quite a few mainstream marketing sites that will do exactly the same thing. Quite often you will pick up garbage like that when you respond to some free offer for smilies or similar things. At other times the computer owners will declare that they have Nortons or this or that anti-virus software installed and they just don’t know how something like that could have got through. Well the fact of the matter is that most anti-virus software is not half as good as you might think it is. There is a lot of hype and hoop-la used to sell anti-virus software and most of it is little more than smoke and mirrors. Right now the very best anti-virus software that is available is called Kaspersky. You can find it at http://www.kaspersky.com. You can do a free online scan of your machine (although that does take some time) or you can download a trial version that will last for a month. After that you will have to pay a very reasonable amount for a year’s subscription. Kaspersky will scan your machine and your incoming email and it will also update itself three times a day so it is far more current and up to date than most of the junk that people think will keep them protected. We use it on all of our machines and surf a wide variety of sites every day of the week. We have had only one minor problem since we installed it. And at the time we first installed it and it ran its initial scan it found a virus in an attachment that had come in an email three years before and was archived on one of the machines. Several other
highly recommended anti virus programmes had missed that attachment but
not Kaspersky.
19 Sep 2005 |
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