Prevention and management of malware

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Malware is simply short for ‘malicious software’. Malware is a type of computer program that is made for the sole purpose of infecting and causing harm to computers. Malware comes in various forms and therefore affects your machine in many different ways.

Types of Malware

There are many different types of Malware and all of them affect your machine or devices in different ways.

  • Viruses
  • Spyware
  • Adware
  • Trojans
  • Worms
  • Rootkits
  • Keyloggers
  • Backdoors
  • Rogue Security Software
  • Browser Hijackers
  • Ransomware

How does Malware get on your machine?

Just as extensive as the list of Malware, is the amount of ways Malware can affect your machine and devices. Malware can enter your machine/devices in many ways.

  • Attached in emails-
  • Infected Removable Media-
  • Infected or hacked websites-
  • Hidden in other software-

What can I do to prevent getting Malware on my machine?

The most obvious way of preventing Malware on your machine is installing a good antivirus product. Being protected with strong security software such as ESET antivirus is a must in today’s IT environments. There is a famous quote that says “the only problem with free antivirus is that it cost too much”. With our 15+ years of experience, we believe this is extremely true. If you think about it, you realise what the difference between a free product and a paid for one is. How would a free product be updated daily? How would it be developed to cover a wider variety of threats? In short, it would not and with antivirus, you get what you pay for. We have been working with ESET for 10 years and are confident that this is the only antivirus product for you.

Another way of preventing Malware is ensuring any available updates to your machine are installed. Updates are a must for all programs and operating systems. Updates are a must for all programs and operating systems. Windows updates get turned off all the time why is this? Well, there are a lot of reasons, from people not wanting to have longer load times to people believing that they do not need the updates. So why are updates important? Let’s say that a flaw has been found in Windows 10 and that flaw lets people access all your data over the internet. Imagine if this were to be posted on the internet and every black hat hacker or kid in his bedroom could then access your data. Microsoft would create a patch for the flaw and send out the patch in an update to everybody immediately. If you have your updates turned off little, Jimmy down the road will be reading all your confidential documents. This is a bit extreme but it is possible so always install any available updates when you can.

Backing up is a must for all of us, not only for big corporate companies but also for smaller business-es and home users. I know from first-hand experience all hard drives fail in the end and if you don’t want to spend hundreds/ thousands of pounds to get your data retrieved forensically, you will need a solid plan with plenty of redundancy. Home users should have a backup on a portable hard drive as well as a cloud-based backup as redundancy. For a business, there is more to think about making a disaster recovery plan and testing it is a must!

In Summary

You need to spread awareness within your peer groups and organisations of what Malware is and how to protect against it. The more you do to prevent Malware the less you will get coming in. You need to ensure you are: protected with a good antivirus product, installing all necessary updates and are backing up your data regularly.