A client called me the other morning, panicked. He opened a virus infected email from someone that was disguised as a legitimate message from UPS. The message said something to the effect that there was a problem with the shipping address of his recent shipment and the details are in the attached file.

Coincidentally, he had just ordered something online earlier that very morning. He was in a hurry to get to a meeting when he saw the message came in so without hardly giving it a thought, he opened the message and infected his system.

While virus scanning and spyware prevention programs prevent many types of malicious code from running on your computer, when the user deliberately clicks and executes something it’s almost like a temporary override occurs. In an instant, your system is infected. One of the first things this particular bug did was disable his Antivirus program’s resident shield.

It’s the resident shield’s job to monitor system activity and quarantine infected files and stop bad code from running. With the resident shield down, the virus “invited in all it’s friends” and proceeded to make a mess of the system in a short time before he even realized he’d been had.

I’m pleased to report we were able to act quickly to clean out the virus, plus we took extra steps to help protect the computer even further. Techniques such as seperate Malware protection such as from Malwarebytes.org, and AVG Internet Security which provides a local firewall in addition to virus scanning are a couple of the strategies we use in higher-risk applications.

If you’re concerned about virus protection, spyware or security in general, contact Bill Bowman (Senior Technology Advisor) or I for a free System Vulnerability and Risk assessment of your computing environment.

-Paul
***
Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.

508-347-9550 x115