Is Antivirus Enough Security?

Original story: Tim McGrath

The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal all suffered significant security breaches during 2012.  All were running anti-virus software that failed.
It is reported by an anonymous IT worker: “They had the ability to get around to different servers and hide their tracks. They seemed to have the ability to do anything they wanted on the network.”
CNN Money reports: “During a four-month long cyberattack by Chinese hackers on the New York Times,  the company’s antivirus software missed 44 of the 45 pieces of malware installed by attackers on the network.”

If this happens to large world renowned newspapers, what is a Small Medium Business (SMB) suppose to do?

Experts say that antivirus software is still a good, basic thing to have. Owning an antivirus solution is like putting the Club in your car — it’s not going to stop a determined thief, but it’s going to make stealing your stuff more difficult.   The amazing thing is I have heard the manager of a 65 store chain insist that their 5 year old router and anti-virus software is ‘all the protection we need’ !!
When reading a report on Email based Malware in July 2012 “… focus on most this report is the atrociously low detection rate for these spammed malware samples. On average, antivirus software detected these threats about 22 percent of the time on the first day they were sent and scanned at virustotal.com. If we take the median score, the detection rate falls to just 17 percent. That’s actually down from last months’s average and median detection rates, 24.47 percent and 19 percent, respectively.”

“That’s a stunning wake-up call to people and businesses who think they are fully protected by their antivirus software. “
“Even the most modern version of antivirus software doesn’t give consumers or enterprises what they need to compete in the hacker world,” said Dave Aitel, CEO of security consultancy Immunity . “It’s just not as effective as it needs to be.”

Solution:
First thing to do, get a preliminary security assessment! The security auditor will check a lot more than just if you have anti-virus.

Story by Tim McGrath  http://its-secure.ca/blog/anti-virus-software-that-failed

For more information locally regarding your security, call Big Mike Computer Services in the north end of Nanaimo today:

240-740-1812

http://www.bigmikecomputerservices.ca

Happy Computing!

Can't Boot? Try Unplugging All USB Devices.

Today I was called to check out a computer that would not boot.

As it turned out, the problem was that he had a USB printer attached that was powered. It happened to be a Canon Pixma printer that was plugged into the wall for power and p...lugged into the laptop via USB.

Here's the deal. USB ports are powered. Not only that, but many of today's printers have card readers, which show up as drive letters on your machine. So what happened in this case was that the laptop was looking to be booted from a USB device such as a USB stick or cd-rom, OR another media drive like Compaq Flash or SD chip, etc. See how that works?

Nowadays USB sticks have all but replaced external DVD-RW as the primary or secondary bootable device. From the factory these little ACER ONEs are set to look to boot from a USB device, and if nothing is there to boot from it usually next tries to boot off the hard drive. Sometimes the next boot device might be to boot off the LAN or network.

In my case today, it hung looking to boot from a USB drive letter that had nothing to give back. As soon as we unplugged the USB printer and rebooted the machine, it booted up just fine as normal.

Check out my website: http://www.bigmikecomputerservices.ca/

Happy Computing!
Big Mike

Where Did 2012 Go?

Hard to believe it's 2013 already. I was so busy in 2012 I didn't get much chance to blog.  Happy New Year (x2), Happy Valentines Day (x2), Merry Christmas (x1) and Happy Easter (x2), etc.!

Now it's Spring, and with it comes a time of cleansing.  Bring your dusty PC to Big Mike Computer Services in Nanaimo and have the dust blown out for free.  Call 250-740-1812 to book your appointment.  While you're there, have Big Mike put your machine on the bench for a quick check up.

Big Mike Computer Services is located at 6132 Mystic Way, Nanaimo, BC.

We do hardware upgrades, virus removal, malware removal, RAM upgrades, tweaks, troubleshoots and transfers.  Need your data backed up or recovered?  Call Big Mike today.

250-740-1812