Protect Your Business Establishments From Malware With Antivirus Software

 Protect Your Business Establishments From Malware With Antivirus Software

Do you know what malicious code is? How can it affect you? and how to protect yourself? Malicious code or malware has always been a threat to both home users and businesses. In recent years there have been important changes in the field of malware development, creating a veritable cybercrime industry. It is essential to consciously address this problem in the company. To protect against malware in the company, a global and planned strategy must be developed. It should include all corporate equipment and devices, including mobile devices and external storage media such as USB, portable hard drives, etc.

Depending on the protection needs and the size of the company, the security industry offers different solutions that can be adapted to the needs and that we could include in:

Solutions for the Workplace. They are the best known and most widespread. They are installed on work computers or laptops. Its scope of protection against malware is, worth the redundancy, any workstation connected to the corporate network, and the Internet.

Solutions for Mobile Devices. Specific for the protection of mobile devices used for mobile work, such as smartphones and tablets. They are present in the official APPs of mobile devices.

Corporate Solutions. They are global protection solutions, whose scope of protection is the entire organization or a large number of systems. There are different modalities, depending on the economic and protection needs of each company:

• Unified Threat Management or UTM ( Unified Threat Management ). They are comprehensive security solutions, usually include firewalls, content filters, and anti-malware functionalities.
• Internet service providers or ISPs (Internet Service Provider), which provide, as an added service, protection services that filter all data traffic that arrives and leaves our organization's network in search of malware to block it.
• Security Operations Centers or SOC (Security Operation Center), where all material and human efforts (internal or contracted to a third party) specialized in maintaining the security of the company are centralized.

Cloud Solutions. They consist of dedicated servers that analyze customer systems in real-time without having to have a specific program installed on each computer or sophisticated computer dedicated to it.

These solutions offer protection against many types of malicious code, neutralizing threats that can arrive through different routes such as external storage devices, email, instant messaging, etc.

When selecting an antimalware solution to protect our computers, in addition to these that suit our technological infrastructure and the needs of our business, we will verify that they meet these requirements :

As important as having a good antimalware program installed, which protects us from the threats of malicious code, is to keep them properly updated. Updates are used to keep the malware threat signature database up to date, with which the program searches for and detects threats. Keep in mind that there are thousands of new viruses every day, so it is important to update it.

But as we have said on other occasions, not everything is technology. It is advisable to follow these good practices in our companies to prevent possible malware infections:

1. Design a security policy that regulates all the measures to be adopted for the general protections of the company, as well as an action plan in the event of a malware incident.
2. Keep operating systems, applications, and all software updated (which also includes Antivirus Software). Most security incidents, including those related to malware, originate from a lack of security update/patching that served as an entry hole for the cybercriminal.
3. Make periodic backup copies of the information and define procedures for restoring said copies. Keep the backup system protected so that it is not affected by possible malware attacks. It is one of the basic measures to be considered within an action plan. The ransomware-type malware that has affected a large number of companies can be solved by reinstalling the applications and using a backup.
4. Prepare a list of allowed applications and avoid downloading and installing programs from websites that do not offer due security guarantees.
5. Raise awareness and train our employees to make proper use of corporate resources. Although it is the last in this list, it is without a doubt the most important. Aware and trained employees prevent most of the security incidents.

You can complete these measures with others of a more technical nature, which your usual technology provider can develop, which we cite in the next post on best practices against malware.

Keeping our companies and assets safe from the risks posed by malware is critical to the survival of our businesses. Remember! the best defence against all these types of threats is awareness and prevention. Protect your company!