This post is not to scare you but more to inform you that in today’s world virus protection alone will not protect you from the countless dangers of being on the web. For example how many of you have seen this pop up on your screen and clicked on it?
Now a lot of people use Microsoft Security Essentials because it is free and even comes pre-installed on a several computer manufacturers by default so when they see this familiar pop up they click on Clean Computer and right then and there you gave a random website permission to download and install malware. That is all it took to compromise the data on your computer and hand it over to someone else.
Now if you look at that pop up you will see some spelling errors but reading it quickly it looks very legit. Now you might have antivirus installed but typically that only protects threats you didn’t authorize. In this case you anti virus allowed the malware to get installed because you clicked on the “Clean Computer” button. Your antivirus doesn’t know this isn’t something you didn’t intend to install.
So how do you protect yourself from threats like this? Well, there are several solutions. Some antivirus engines like McAfee have an all in one solution with web protection from allowing these popups to even show up, or maybe even block that web page all together. The problem with solutions like the McAfee all in solutions is they are very complex and typically lock your computer down to the point that you can hardly use it.
At The Tek we have implement a solution that is now deployed at over 15 customer locations and is proven to protect and work in the back ground without affecting your day to day use of the computer. Our solution has three parts to it and it runs in the background and reports back to us if there is an issue.
Virus Protection Engine
This is your typical virus engine. It is scanning your PC ALL the time. Anytime a file is opened or executed it checks it to make sure it is safe. If it isn’t then grabs it, sticks it in quarantine and protects you from the threat. Along with the continuous protection at least once a week it does a deep scan for additional protection. If it finds a threat it tells us about it and we deal with it. This is what it looks like on our dashboard:
Web Protection
Built into the same tool that provides Antivirus is a web protection tool. This simply looks at the page you are trying to visit and looks at a database online to determine if that page is safe. If it isn’t you get a very simple warning that says “This page isn’t safe”. With protection like this you will never see that fake Microsoft Alert, or any other convincing pop up that looks legit:
Daily Security Checks
Every 15 minutes our tool along with the Anti virus and web protection does a check of your event logs and makes sure there aren’t a bunch of unauthorized access attempts. If there is we hear about it via a text or email and we take action.
All three of these combined have resulted in exceptional protection for our customers and they can work worry free and focus on their business and not on Virus and Web Protection.
Of course the best protection is being overly cautious and if something looks fishy then don’t even mess with it. So when you get emails with attachments labeled “video of cute bunny” or a pop up that says “your infected click here now to protect yourself”…don’t do it, Call us at The Tek and we will let you know if it is legit or not!!
Hope you have a productive and virus free day!
Joey Costa – CEO
The Tek, LLC
www.TheTek.com
