Security Software Suited To You...

In today’s modern climate, it is imperative for every computer to have an effective, up-to-date, and comprehensive anti-virus software package running on it. This is especially crucial for computers that are connected to the internet, as well as for safeguarding other interconnected devices.

Viruses have evolved over time, and virus writers now employ sophisticated techniques to exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems for malicious purposes. It is essential to remember that viruses are not the only forms of malicious threats. There are numerous others, including ransomware, trojans, botnets, malware, phishing, identity theft, and more. Today’s threats are primarily driven by criminal intent.

To ensure the protection of your computer and safeguard against these evolving threats, it is essential to invest in robust anti-virus software. At SM Computer Solutions, we offer a range of cutting-edge anti-virus solutions tailored to your specific needs. Our software is designed to detect and neutralize various forms of malware, keeping your computer and data secure. Don’t compromise on your online security – explore our comprehensive anti-virus solutions today.

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SM Computer Solutions...

SM Computer Solutions, based in the UK, is your trusted partner in safeguarding your systems against potential threats. With years of experience in the field, we offer expert advice and recommend highly effective and secure anti-virus products. Our team takes the time to understand your specific requirements and assess the need for anti-virus software, ensuring that we recommend the most suitable solution for you and your system.

Protecting your systems from malicious attacks is paramount in today’s digital landscape. At SM Computer Solutions, we prioritise the security of your valuable data and sensitive information. Our recommended anti-virus products have a proven track record of success, providing robust protection against a wide range of threats. With our expertise and in-depth knowledge of the industry, you can trust us to deliver the most reliable and secure anti-virus solutions tailored to your specific needs.

Don’t leave your systems vulnerable to potential risks. Contact SM Computer Solutions today to discuss your requirements and let our team recommend the best anti-virus product to keep your systems secure and protected.

So, What would we recommend to you?

At SM Computer Solutions, we are committed to providing you with the best anti-virus solutions tailored to your specific needs. Our experienced team will sit down with you to discuss and recommend the most suitable options for your device’s security. We highly recommend either a Sophos solution or an Eset solution, both of which have proven track records in delivering reliable and robust protection.

Once we have identified the ideal anti-virus solution for your device, our experts will ensure that everything is set up correctly. We will also ensure that you are running on the latest version of the software. This is crucial because outdated solutions can leave your device vulnerable to infections and security breaches. By keeping your software up to date, we can minimise the risks and enhance your overall security posture.

Safeguarding your device against potential threats is of utmost importance. Trust SM Computer Solutions to provide you with comprehensive and up-to-date anti-virus solutions. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and let our team recommend the best security measures for your device’s protection.

Protect Your Data: Effective Ransomware Prevention Measures

Introduction:

In today’s digital landscape, ransomware has emerged as a significant threat to individuals and businesses alike. This malicious software encrypts valuable data, holding it hostage until a ransom is paid. To safeguard your sensitive information and avoid falling victim to ransomware attacks, it is crucial to implement robust prevention measures. In this article, we will explore effective strategies for ransomware prevention, ensuring the security and integrity of your data.

1. Keep Your Software Up to Date:

One of the most critical steps in preventing ransomware attacks is to maintain up-to-date software. Regularly update your operating system, antivirus software, web browsers, and other applications. Software updates often include important security patches that address vulnerabilities exploited by cybercriminals. By keeping your software current, you close potential entry points for ransomware attacks.

2. Practice Safe Email and Web Browsing Habits:

Ransomware often enters systems through malicious email attachments or links. Exercise caution when opening email attachments, especially from unfamiliar senders. Avoid clicking on suspicious links in emails or on websites. Implement robust spam filters to prevent potentially harmful emails from reaching your inbox. Educate yourself and your employees about phishing techniques, as ransomware attackers often rely on deceptive emails to gain access to your systems.

3. Backup Your Data Regularly:

Regular data backups are crucial for ransomware prevention. Create a comprehensive backup strategy that includes storing copies of your important data on offline or cloud-based systems. Offline backups, such as external hard drives, ensure that your data remains inaccessible to ransomware. Regularly test your backup systems to ensure data integrity and accessibility in case of an attack.

4. Implement Strong Security Measures:

Enhancing your overall security posture can significantly reduce the risk of ransomware infections. Utilize strong, unique passwords for all your accounts and encourage employees to do the same. Implement multi-factor authentication to add an extra layer of protection. Install and regularly update reliable antivirus and anti-malware software to detect and block ransomware threats. Consider deploying robust firewalls and intrusion detection systems to safeguard your network against unauthorized access.

5. Conduct Employee Training and Awareness:

Human error remains a significant factor in ransomware infections. Educate your employees about the risks of ransomware and provide comprehensive training on safe browsing habits, email security, and identifying potential threats. Encourage them to report any suspicious activities promptly. By fostering a security-conscious culture, you can strengthen your defense against ransomware attacks.

Conclusion:

Prevention is the key to combating ransomware and protecting your valuable data. By implementing these effective prevention measures, such as keeping software up to date, practicing safe browsing habits, regularly backing up data, enhancing security measures, and conducting employee training, you can significantly reduce the risk of falling victim to ransomware attacks. Stay proactive, stay informed, and safeguard your data from this ever-evolving threat.

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Ransomware Protection

Stop ransomware with Sophos’ Intercept X, combining deep learning with best-in-class anti-exploit technology, CryptoGuard anti-ransomware capabilities, root cause analysis, and more to give you the industry’s most comprehensive endpoint protection. Sophos XG Firewall protects your perimeter by integrating exploit prevention and CryptoGuard Protection technologies from Intercept X. These capabilities identify malware exploits and ransomware before they get onto your network. Combined with XG Firewall’s Intrusion Prevention System, you get protection from endpoint vulnerabilities as well as network vulnerabilities.

Perimeter Protection

Stay protected against the latest advanced threats to your perimeter like cryptomining, bots, worms, hacks, breaches and APTs with XG Firewall’s robust protection. You get powerful Sandstorm sandboxing; deep learning with artificial intelligence, delivering the industry’s best detection rates without using signatures; top performing IPS; and web protection with dual AV, JavaScript emulation, and SSL inspection.

Instant Threat Indentification and Isolation with Syncronized Security

Get better protection against advanced threats and spend less time responding to incidents with Sophos Synchronized Security. Synchronized Security brings Sophos’ best-of-breed products together to detect and prevent advanced attacks. It isolates infected endpoints before the threat can spread, slashing incident response time by 99.9%. You can identify the source of an infection on your network and automatically limit access to other network resources in response until the infection is cleaned up.

Protection of Encrypted Traffic

Sophos XG Firewall ensures that encrypted traffic in your network does not remain a blind spot by offering a fully transparent SSL scanning, enforcement, and protocol validation. SSL decryption securely intercepts and decrypts SSL traffic to allow deep scanning for security, compliance, and policy checks with policy-driven opt-outs, allowing privacy for sensitive traffic. Protocol enforcement for encrypted traffic connections identifies and blocks unwanted traffic trying to bypass filtering or traffic shaping.

Use the latest version of your security software

Install the most recent version of your security software, as many infections occur because outdated solutions remain in place. If you have a valid ESET license, updating to the latest version costs nothing. If you are still using ESET Endpoint Security versions 3 or 4, we strongly recommend updating to the newest, 6th generation of our business products, which applies the latest technologies specially crafted to improve client protection from malware that uses obfuscation and/or encryption to stay undetected. Examples of these technologies include Advanced Memory Scanner,
which looks for suspicious behavior after malware decloaks in the memory, and Exploit Blocker, which strengthens protection against targeted attacks and previously unseen vulnerabilities, also known as
zero-day vulnerabilities.

Keep your security software’s virus database up-to-date

New versions of ransomware are released frequently, so it is important that computers and other company devices receive regular virus database updates. Among other precautions, this helps to ensure they are not vulnerable to ransomware infections. ESET products check for updates every hour, provided they detect a valid license and a working Internet connection.

Enable the ESET LiveGrid® cloud protection system

Unknown and potentially malicious applications, and other possible threats, are monitored and submitted to the ESET cloud via the ESET LiveGrid Feedback System. The samples collected are subjected to automatic sandboxing and behavioural analysis, which results in the creation of automated signatures if malicious characteristics are confirmed. ESET clients learn about these automated detections via the ESET
LiveGrid Reputation System in a matter of minutes, without the need to wait for the next signature database update. If a process is deemed unsafe – such as deleting a backup – it is immediately blocked. It is important to note that ESET LiveGrid uses only hashes of suspicious files, never their contents, thus respecting the privacy of ESET customers.

Back up Important Data Regularly

The single, best measure to defeat ransomware before it even starts its malicious activity, is to have a regularly updated backup. Remember that malware will also encrypt files on drives that are mapped and have been assigned a drive letter, and sometimes even on drives that are unmapped.  This includes any external drives such as a USB thumb drive, as well as any network or cloud file stores. Hence, a regular backup regimen is essential, ideally using an off-site, offline device for storing the backup files.

Patch up and Update Your Software Automatically

Malware authors frequently rely on people running outdated software with known vulnerabilities, which they can exploit to silently access company devices and their systems. Businesses can significantly decrease the potential for ransomware pain if they make a practice of updating company software and devices as often as possible. Some software vendors release security updates on a regular basis, but there are often “out-of-cycle” or unscheduled updates in cases of emergency. Enable automatic updates if you can, or go directly to vendors’ websites.

Pay Attention To Your Employees’ Security Training

One of the most common infection vectors is social engineering – methods that are based on fooling users and trying to convince them to run executable files. By claiming to be a tracking notification email from a delivery company (such as FedEx or UPS), an email from their bank, or an internal company message such as New_Wages.pdf.exe, the attackers try to dupe employees to achieve their malicious goals.  To prevent this from happening, employees should be trained not to open any unknown or suspicious email attachments, links or files.

Show Hidden File-Extensions

Ransomware frequently arrives in an email attachment with the extension “.PDF.EXE”. This counts on Window’s default behaviour of hiding known file extensions. Re-enabling the display of the full file extension
makes spotting suspicious files easier.

Filter Executable Attachments in E-mail

If your gateway mail scanner has the ability to filter files by extension, you may wish to block emails sent with “.EXE” file attachments, or those with attachments that have two file extensions ending with an
executable (“*.*.EXE” files, in filter-speak). We also recommend filtering files with the following extensions: *.BAT, *.CMD, *.SCR and *.JS.

Disable Files Running from AppData/LocalAppData Folders

A notable behavior of a large proportion of ransomware variants is that they run their executable from the AppData or Local AppData folder. You can create rules within Windows or with intrusion prevention
software to disallow this behavior. If for some reason legitimate software is set to run from the AppData rather than the usual Program Files area, you will need to exclude it from this rule.

Consider Shared Folders

Bear in mind that any company device infected by ransomware might also cause encryption of all files in shared folders to which it has write permission. For this reason, employees should consider which valuable
and sensitive files they store on shared disks, as their data in these locations might get encrypted by malware, even though their computer was not directly infected.

Disable RDP

Ransomware often accesses target machines using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), a Windows utility that allows others to access desktops remotely. Cybercriminals have also been known to log in via an RDP session and disable the security software. It is best practice to disable RDP unless you need it in your environment. For instructions on how to do so, visit the appropriate Microsoft Knowledge Base articles.

Use a Reputable Security Suite

Malware authors frequently send out new variants of their malicious code, trying to avoid detection, so it is important to have multiple layers of protection. Even after it burrows into a system, most malware
relies on remote instructions to perform serious mischief.  If you encounter a ransomware variant that is so new that it gets past antimalware software, it may still be caught when it attempts to connect with its Command and Control (C&C) server to receive instructions for encrypting files. ESET’s latest software suite provides an enhanced Botnet Protection module that blocks malicious traffic trying to communicate with a C&C server

Use System Restore to get back to a Known-Clean State

If System Restore is enabled on the infected Windows machine, it might be possible to take the system back to a known-clean state and restore some of the encrypted files from “shadow” files. But you have
to outsmart the malware and move quickly.  This is because some of the newer ransomware has the ability to delete the “shadow” files from System Restore. Such malware will start deleting “shadow” files whenever the executable file is run, and you might not even know that this is happening, since executable files can run without the operator knowing, as a normal part of Windows system operation.

Use a Standard Account instead of one with Administrator Privileges

Using an account with system administrator privileges is always a security risk, because then malware is allowed to run with elevated rights and may infect the system easily. Be sure that users always use a limited user account for regular daily tasks and the system administrator account only when it is absolutely necessary. Do not disable User Access Control.

Sophos Anti-Virus:

When it comes to robust and reliable anti-virus solutions, Sophos is a name that stands out. As a leading provider in the industry, Sophos offers comprehensive anti-virus software designed to protect your systems from a multitude of threats. With its advanced threat detection capabilities and proactive approach, Sophos Anti-Virus ensures that your devices are shielded from malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks. With regular updates and real-time scanning, Sophos Anti-Virus keeps your systems secure, providing you with peace of mind. Trust Sophos to safeguard your valuable data and defend against the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats.

Eset Anti-Virus:

When it comes to top-notch protection against viruses and malware, Eset Anti-Virus is a trusted choice. Renowned for its cutting-edge technology and exceptional performance, Eset Anti-Virus offers a comprehensive suite of features to keep your systems secure. With its advanced heuristics and signature-based scanning, Eset Anti-Virus efficiently detects and eliminates threats, ensuring the integrity of your data. From real-time protection to comprehensive malware removal, Eset Anti-Virus provides robust defence against viruses, ransomware, phishing attempts, and more. Stay one step ahead of cybercriminals with Eset Anti-Virus and experience the peace of mind that comes with knowing your systems are protected.

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