Hi Everyone. I am asked all the time about anti-virus, both
personally and professionally. The answer always starts the same; it makes no
difference how much you buy or how much you have. Nothing is 100%. With that
being said, I want to talk to you about your home protection.
My suggestion is a two-part scenario that focuses on
prevention more so than remediation. Think about that. Certainly, it would be
more beneficial to your time and energy if you put a plan in motion that works
on being proactive, so you do not spend much time reacting to every threat, am
I right? Let’s have a look at this scenario.
Part One – There are dozens of anti-virus products out there
and they are essentially as effective as the flu shot; not very. So how do you
choose which one to get? Should you pay for protection or get the free
protection? Free protection is great if you are the type of person who will
scrutinize everything that happens to your system because of the horrors of the
Internet. However, if you ask what Joel does, I pay for the premium version of
MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. Here is why. MalwareBytes has a much different stand
on viruses; instead of remediation after infection, they focus on being
proactive and making sure the infection cannot harm your system and they do so
by stopping the two-way communication between the virus and the virus command
center.
Part Two – Take an extra step to protect your home network
and do it for free! Stop on over to OpenDNS.com and sign up for an account and
start protecting. Here at Reybold, we use Cisco Umbrella which is the
Enterprise version of OpenDNS. With this free personal service, you will either
change some settings in your computers or in your home router with their
incredibly easy-to-follow instructions and once done, you are under the umbrella
of protection by the service. Not only does OpenDNS provide a much faster
browsing service for your Internet, it also has the build-in protection that
Cisco offers by blocking bad elements from passing through the DNS to your
router and/or systems.
So, this is my personal plan that somewhat follows the path
we use here at work. We deploy a strong Anti-Virus package on the computers and
then we add the outer layer of protection from Cisco to keep bad guys out to
begin with. Just remember, this is like anything else and not 100% effective.
All of these things cannot prevent the number one problem when it comes to
infections; the human element. You still have to be vigilant with where you are
browsing and what happens in your email.
