Anti-Virus

I was called in to work Wednesday because we had a video server that was calling a city in central China. –This is not only upsetting, it chews up bandwidth like you would not believe, and if there is one thing we don’t need, it’s for the network to slow down.

The trojan hadn’t infected any of our other machines, and no data was compromised, but it showed the price of carelessness. Not only did the company have to pay ot, we had to crisscross the valley to reach each of our locations in order to physically scan all of our workstations and servers. -Our outlying locations open at 9am close at 6pm, we were waiting by the door of our initial problem when it opened, and by 5pm had successfully checked four out of the five offices.

The flaw in the system that caused the problem was two fold: First, because it served nothing but surveillance video we hadn’t gotten around to putting anti-virus on the box. –This is an unforgivable oversight, because it facilitated the downloading of the trojan.

The second was that we hadn’t locked down the machine to prevent other internet access. The machine sits behind a firewall, meaning that the only way it could have become infected is if someone used it to access an infected website, open an infected email, or inserted a flash drive they brought from home.

I don’t care how cute your youngest child is or how neat a program is. DO NOT bring anything from home and plug it into your work computer, including flash drives and DVDs. –This is one of the primary ways infections spread.

The bottom line is that business class anti-virus software costs money that many small businesses don’t have, or don’t want to spend, and any anti-virus software requires a certain amount of maintenance. But it will go a long ways towards preventing drive-by downloads. Which in turn will help keep your data safe from prying eyes. –Providing of course you can keep people from clicking yes instead of no when that pop-up appears, or opening every email just because they are curious –or so incredibly naive that they think that an anti-virus program is going to protect them from themselves–.

You need to be vigilant in protecting your company’s and customer’s information, because sooner or later someone, even you, is going to screw up. You will notice that I said going to, not likely to, screw up.

Scan your machines daily and keep backups of all your important data and software. —You also need to keep multiple backups from different times because of the possibility of data corruption or infected files.