by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Many people have asked lately how their computer might get infected by viruses. There are a large number of ways that a virus can get into your PC.
So you need to be properly protected so that in the event viruses find their way onto your system they will be eradicated.
The most important part of improving virus protection is starting with good reputable antivirus software. These usually do require that a little bit of money be spent, but the benefits far outweigh the cost.
There are a lot of antivirus software providers making it difficult to choose which antivirus to purchase.
When choosing an antivirus application, you want it to protect against known threats and irregular behavior or heuristics. Heuristics is a form of “artificial intelligence” which monitors patterns of behavior similar to malware activity.
You will always need to make sure that your antivirus software is up to date.
In some software, where it is okay to fall behind on an update, here and there to maintain functionality in some proprietary software, this is not true with your antivirus software.
Each update contains another list of viruses that have been found in the wild. Antivirus software usually costs a periodic fee that must be paid to continue your subscribed service.
This subscribed service is the updates to the antivirus software, and you will want to make sure that your subscription does not run out.
Once you have an antivirus program installed, you will want to schedule it to run at a time when your computer is on but not in use. This will keep your computer clean and not slow down your work.
Another serious measure of protection is keeping all applications on your computer up to date. Windows updates all the time to fix any new security vulnerabilities that become discovered.
All of the programs that you have installed on your computer must remain up to date as well. These applications update to improve the application and to fix security vulnerabilities.
If for some reason you have to keep an outdated version of software on a computer, then is is even more important to protect that software against viruses.
Even the best antivirus software cannot protect against all viruses. This is where backups are useful. You should back up your network constantly, and your workstation weekly.
Having backups on and off site is the best way to prevent costly disaster from striking your company. You will need to monitor your backups on a regular basis in order to confirm that the process is working properly.
Without testing, your backups may be corrupt and you would have no way of knowing.
We offer managed antivirus, backups and services such as patch management. This means that for a low monthly cost we can manage all of your computer updates and backups.
We can take the hassle out of which updates you should or should not install. We can also offer a cloud based backup solution to protect you from losing data that cannot be easily replaced.