A Sky Engineer prepared a laptop by popping out one end of a memory stick.  All that was necessary to fix it was to reseat the memory.  What the repair shops didn’t know was that the computer was programmed to log everything that happened and to photograph the person performing the actions using the laptop’s built-in webcam.

Repair shops found the problem right away, booting the computer successfully after reseating the memory stick.  Even major firms engaged in unethical and illegal practices, from calling to demand advance payment for a replacement system board after the notebook was fixed, to attempting to access online bank accounts using information found by snooping through files in the notebook.

I’m frankly appalled at what I have seen from some firms right here at home in the U.S.  Here are a couple of examples:

• A PC repair firm log into a client’s system remotely, then let the logged in session run all night at over $90 per hour while nothing was being done, and the client received a fat bill even when the technician was unable to fix the problem he had caused in the first place, and was unable to fix.
• A firm used pirated operating systems to install software on at least one client computer – a Google search of the license key revealed nearly 700 hits from software piracy sites going back at least four years.  The technician charged money to install pirate software on a client’s machine.

At my company, P3iSystems, we have a client Bill of Rights which has a number of commitments to our clients clearly spelled out.  How about your Technology Provider?  Do they have a list of ethical guidelines and quality guarantees?

But this answer doesn’t come without qualifications.

• Free antivirus is appropriate for your home PC.
• Your business computers need to be protected by commercial anti-malware protection.
• Not all free antivirus solutions are created equal.
• Your PC should be defended by multiple layers of protection.

Most computers nowadays are sold with one of the big antivirus solutions already installed in a demonstration version that lasts for 90 days then requires you to pay up in order to get continued protection.  But what do you do then?  Do you have to subscribe to the antivirus solution your computer manufacturer installed?

David Hall, Product Manager Asia-Pacific Consumer Products and Solutions for Symantec (the company that sells Norton Anti-Virus) suggests in this interview that free antivirus is just not up to scratch when it comes to protecting your PC.

The article is not exactly false, but let’s face it.  Mr. Hall is not exactly an objective observer.   A product manager is expected to take positions that sell his own stuff, after all.  So is the article correct or not?  The answer – it depends.

There are some free antivirus products available that offer very good protection, and some that are not as good.   Worse, among the most commonly encountered species of malware or viruses are called rogue antivirus programs, which are malware programs disguised as antivirus programs (nasty programs like Windows Antivirus 2009 or Antivirus 360 are actually themselves viruses).

Mr. Hall is correct – just antivirus protection is not enough for your PC.  You need multiple layers of defense to effectively protect your PC.

First there is standard antivirus protection:

• Antivirus software that scans each file read from or written to your disk (on-demand scanning)
• Email scanning that checks incoming messages.

These first two layers of protection are probably already familiar to you – they’ve been the bread and butter of antivirus software for years, and will protect you against nasty pieces of code that are written to your hard disk as files.  But things have gotten more complicated in the past few years.

Nowadays the most common way your PC gets infected, and by PC I mean your Windows(tm) PC – Macs, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems are immune to most of the malware that’s out there (but not 100%).  There are malware threats to those computers as well, but they’re outside the scope of this article.  Here we’re talking about Windows.

Back in the 1990s, the hackers and virus makers were mostly college students and techno-geeks exploring the limits of the technology and their ability to do interesting things with it.  Not so any more.  Today, virus makers and malware authors are the hirelings of well-organized, well-financed criminal enterprises and the evil code they produce is all about making money illegally.  The Bad Guys do this by infecting your machine with several types of malware code:

• Programs that recruit your PC into a botnet, running a program on it that obeys the orders of the bad guys instead of you, using your PC as part of a massive network of slave PCs that are used to send out Spam or used to attack websites on command.
• Keyloggers that aim to collect your online IDs and passwords in order to gain access to your financial information
• Rogue anti-malware programs that simply want to get you to give up your Credit Card number and extort cash from you (hint – if you give your credit card number up, you don’t get your PC back.  Your credit card just gets charged up to its limit and beyond.

There are other types of malware out there, but these are some of the most prevalent ones.  These programs are most often delivered through your web browser, using a script that either tries to install the malware on your machine invisibly or tries to trick you into clicking OK and installing the bad code.  To protect against this kind of malware you need more layers of protection:

• A web browser plugin that protects against the execution of scripts that install things on your PC without your knowledge or consent
• A plugin component that talks with a clearinghouse that lists web sites that are known hosts of malware and which notifies you if you’re browsing to a known malware site.
• Registry protection that prevents unauthorized modifications to your Windows registry.
• Protection against rootkits that build themselves into your operating system to do their dirty work.

Not all free antivirus softwares include all these layers of protection, and not all commercial software is necessarily better than free software.   There are places where you can get solid, reliable information, though.  Here are a couple of good ones:

• AV-Test dot org has straight info on virus protection.
• Virus Bulletin has the latest news on malware and protection.

You really need multiple layers of protection, but you can get these for free.  I recommend at least three layers, and you can get these for free.  Here are the tools I use on my own home PCs and which I recommend for friends and relatives:

Good free antivirus software.  You can get good results from these:

• Avast – click on free protection.‘
• AVG free edition.  I’ve used this selection for many years, with good results.
• Avira free antivirus

Next, you need to protect your registry.  I’ve had good results from Spybot Search and Destroy.

Finally, you need some on-demand scan and clean support.  Malwarebytes free scanning software does this job well.

In the end you need to be careful where you browse to and cautious about clicking OK.  Every week it seems like I get at least one attempt to download rogue anti-malware onto my PC.  I’m usually using an Ubuntu Linux box, so I’m not as concerned, but my wife uses Windows.  On her PC I have a little script that kills all browser processes – I’ll post the simple instructions for that script here later.  It’s not sophisticated, but it will kill all Internet Explorer and Firefox sessions and if you use Chrome, Safari or another browser you can easily kill those sessions as well.  This will take care of those malware scripts that won’t take no for an answer:  if you click OK they begin installing, but if you click cancel or close they begin installing anyway.   Next post I’ll have instructions for a simple kill script that will work.

Bottom line, you can protect your PC from viruses and malware for free, but you need multiple layers of protection.  The bigger commercial packages will do this for you easily, but you will pay for the convenience of installing a single package that does it all, and the level of protection you get may not be as good as you can get with multiple layers of free software.

Note that this discussion has all been about your home PC.  The same knowledge will help you in the computers you use at your small business, but for your business you need commercial software.  Avast, Avira and AVG have commercial versions which are very reasonably priced and can save you money over the big AV products.

Have questions about protecting your business data?  P3iSystems has a whitepaper to get you started, which you can request for free here.

Protect yourself and your data.  No one else will.  But for your home PC, good protection doesn’t have to cost a lot.  You can protect your home PC for free.

“Wait a minute,” you’re saying.  “I don’t see any answers here.”

Um, well, you haven’t asked any questions yet, have you?  Ask a question, get an answer.  It’s that simple.  Put your question in the comments.  It doesn’t have to relate to the current post.

“Current post?  There aren’t any of those either.”

Okay, you got me.  Give me a hand here – if we work together we can make this a blog that kicks butt, okay?  Thanks.

Seriously, if you’re looking for tech answers you really have come to the right place.  I spent nearly 20 years working for Fortune 500 companies building servers, application infrastructures, running teams of systems engineers, technicians, and working with business people to find solutions to the challenges that faced them.  I dealt with hundreds of servers and tens of thousands of users.

But then something happened.  I started doing consulting on the side, for some small businesses.  It was fun – I had the thrill of being able to provide some real solutions that not only solved business problems, but actually changed lives.  How cool is that?  Don’t believe me?  Read on, friend.

A small businessman spent most of his weekend painstakingly taking figures from an ERP report from a big system and entering them into an Excel spreadsheet so he could track how his business was doing.  Automating that process took it from taking 12 or more hours to under a minute, with no input errors.  What used to take all day Saturday and part of Sunday (during the week he was busy working in his business; working on his business he relegated to the weekend) now took seconds.  Fewer than 100 lines of code made a significant change in this man’s life.

Stories like that one and personal experience showed me that I could really make much more significant impact in the lives of real people in the world of Small Business.  So I started a company called P3iSystems to provide technology services to small businesses.

I’m having more fun than ever, and I have the added satisfaction of building real relationships with my clients, not just solving problems and disappearing, but becoming their trusted advisor for all technological matters.  I’ll talk more about P3iSystems and what we do later.

For now, if you have a technology question or issue, speak up.  I may be able to answer your question – and if I can’t give you an answer, I’ll point you to a place where you can get one.  In the meantime, I’ll be addressing real questions posed to me by clients and other folks I encounter in the small biz world.

Thanks again for visiting – I hope you’ll add the RSS feed for this blog to your reader.   Even more I hope you’ll ask questions that give me a chance to help you out – for free.  Can you beat that?

One more thing – maybe you’re a fellow techie – if you have tech tips for small businesses, let me know – leave a comment or contact me here.  I’ll be glad to hear from you and publish your tip.

Go ahead-try and stump me, but keep it real.  No hypothetical or theoretical questions.  Ask about real tech problems or pains or challenges you’ve come up against in your small business.  If I can’t give you an answer, I’ll help you find where you can get one.