Virus Protection
September 4, 2009
In today’s news there’s a story about how a virus-infected USB stick apparently caused £500,000 of damage to Ealing Council.
It’s amazing that in 2009 there are still plenty of places that don’t seem to bother about virus protection – or who don’t update it regularly.
In the case of this story, it’s the following quote that really tells the tale.
A council report said: “At the point the memory stick was plugged in the virus attacked the host PC. “It blocked connections to anti-virus and Microsoft Support websites and attempted to establish connections with 500 internet sites chosen at random from a selection of 25,000 seeking instructions from its author, and sought to also contact other similarly infected PCs that it could find.“
Straight away you know that the PC that was being used didn’t have any anti-virus installed. If it had, that virus would’ve been stopped in its tracks, and wouldn’t have affected the rest of the network at all.
We’re not saying that not having anti-virus installed will cost you half a million pounds. It might be more, it’s likely to be less. But can you afford the necessary time to clean everything up after an attack like this? Is your data backed up somewhere, just in case the virus does nasty things?
Getting anti-virus software is easy. There’s plenty of suppliers out there – although we always recommend Grisoft’s AVG. We use it ourselves on all our computers – it’s cheap (there’s even a free version for home use) and has always been well-regarded in any reviews of AV software. We’ve seen it clean up a PC infected with thousands of viruses – and not even need a reboot at the end of it.
If nothing else, having anti-virus software installed gives you some peace of mind. It’s one of those things where it’s always better to have it than not.
[Edited to add, in response to Paul C's comment :] However, just installing the Anti-Virus software isn’t enough. As we said up at the top, you’ve also got to keep it up to date. AVG automatically updates itself once a day, so you get the latest updates. Anti-Virus software without regular updates is the same as having no AV software at all.