Anti- Virus Services London

IT for Business Owners, Tip 6 – Anti-Virus Protection

Your small business is a target for cybercriminals. Just over two out of every five small businesses experience at least one attack every twelve months. The cost of this can be high; figures from the UK Government found the average cyber attack can cost a small business up to £115,000 to recover.

Viruses are still one of the major threats to your small business, so you need a way to protect it. Here are some of tried and tested anti-virus protection tips.

1. Use cloud-based services

Cloud-based antivirus and anti-spam services are essential for the protection of your IT infrastructure. On-site protection isn’t always the best option, because the most effective security needs regular updates and checks. Even with the best teams, updates can be disruptive to work as systems are taken down to run them.

Cloud-based services, on the other hand, are maintained by IT security professionals who can run updates to the protection, to offer better defences against the latest threats and still maintain your access to IT systems. Therefore, cloud-based services are better placed to protect you from ever more sophisticated viruses, spam, phishing, ransomware and malware.

2. Incoming email protection

It is estimated that one in every 131 emails contains a threat to your business. If you have a lot of employees with loads of emails coming into the office, then you might have several threats enter your IT system every day. While 78% of your employees probably know of the dangers of clicking on unknown links, they’ll still click on them.

That is why you need to have filtering in place to cut out the spam, viruses and malware that might land in your employee’s email accounts. Filtering doesn’t just mean blocking all potentially dangerous emails. Some filters will request the sender resends the email to confirm it is genuine. Also, filters can check URLs in emails against known or potential dangerous sites and remove emails containing these that might cause problems.

3. Protect your systems from Denial of Service attacks

When you have a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, you can’t work. Your IT network will literally become unusable as your server is inundated with requests. This can be very costly and infuriating for you and staff.

However, cloud-based protection systems can often detect when a DoS attack is coming and move to protect your systems so you don’t notice. Therefore, you can continue to work without worry.

4. Directory harvest attack protection

Directory harvest attacks (DHA) are a lesser known way that attackers get information from victims. It is a process of spamming which allows for valid email addresses to be collected using a dictionary attack.

By using a cloud-based email filtering system, you can eliminate the spam that helps criminals initiate a DHA attack.

5. Email encryption

As well as protecting your employees from malicious incoming emails, you need to protect your outgoing email. Email encryption helps to maintain GDPR compliance by ensuring only those you intend to read each email, can.

This allows for files and other information to be transmitted without fear of the information being stolen.