I am sure this is the dread of almost every company – computers start acting up, a large number of bouncing emails start happening, and suddenly things are looking unusual…
Surprisingly enough, in 2009, this is still a very common occurrence – a virus or worm infection. If you’re running off one computer sometimes it isn’t so bad, or, sometimes (if you forgot to backup) it can be a catastrophe. What is even worse is if you are running on a network, which is almost like virus heaven – one machine becomes infected and suddenly it is spreading everywhere.
Unfortunately I become aware of an incident this morning affecting a small-medium company with about 3 networked servers and an unknown number of workstations, and they are, for the most part, infected with a virus/worm which is propagating via network shares, AND email, so, a large number of bouncing back emails of course. The fix? At the moment we aren’t sure – while the systems had Antivirus running, it obviously wasn’t good enough – whether that was because it was out of date or otherwise – and the decision will be made tomorrow if I should go and visit them to work on the system directly and, if need be, prepare for a rebuild of their systems.
Working previously as a computer technician, and later as a consultant, I was amazed at the number of people who didn’t use Antivirus products, or, who had a system which was out of date. Unfortunately the problem seems to be one of money. It seems that once $1500+ has been forked out for a system, along with software like office etc, the idea of having to pay another $100 for Antivirus tools, as well as pay a fee each year to download the updates automatically seems to be kicking sand in the face of the consumer.
Perhaps the issue here is education? When you buy a car you are required to get compulsory third party insurance before being allowed to register it – what if Antivirus was advertised as the same? What if, when you bought a computer, you paid an ‘insurance’ premium which included things like your antivirus subscriptions and whatever else is needed now days?
So, what should you really do?
Before anything at all I’d really really recommend backups. People might read this and start off on the ‘it is too hard’ excuse, but there are services which will backup all of your data, encrypted, off site for $5/month. Install it, set it up and forget – how hard can that be? And this kind of thing is really something you need before any potential problems occur – trust me on this one – there is no point backing up infected files…
The other thing is to keep your Antivirus tools up to date. Personally I don’t have a favourite at the moment – it has been a while since I’ve really been in the retail industry so I’m no longer qualified to give a full recommendation, but it isn’t hard to find what you need.
And if/when a virus strikes?
Call a professional – if your data is important to you I don’t think it is really an option to be worrying about finances. The longer you continue to use your system, the more time that the virus has to cause damage or make changes to your files.
It might help to think about it in the following terms: How much will 2 days of downtime cost you (or if you loose everything, how much will it cost to get back on board?) – then compare it to how much it would cost to have a professional work on your system for half a day at a minimum. I think you might find that hiring a professional will be much more affordable
As with everything, your means might vary, but its important to try and spend some time on this. I feel that people still see IT as an expense and something that doesn’t have a return, but now pretty much everything depends on IT you can’t afford to be without your systems…
One final thing I should probably mention is that 99.9% of the time when I deal with a virus infection I prefer to wipe the machine clean and start from scratch. While this seems somewhat drastic there is always a chance that reinfection will occur. So, something to keep in mind – you may be able to squash the infection but you never know when it might pop up again…
