In this video, Pete answers a question from Ron, one of our Cloud Concierge member. Ron was curious if he still needs anti-virus in 2018. Watch the video below for more info:
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Transcription:
What’s up guys? Pete Moriarty here and in this video covering, “Do I still need an anti virus in 2018?” Great question from Ron, thanks very much for asking and let’s talk about antivirus. It’s 2018 and viruses have kind of taken a back seat to a couple of other digital threats that are happening now. One of those is phishing where someone steals your information through a fake email, so that might be a fake bank email, might be a fake email from the tax office. You click on that, and you go to a page, which looks like your login page to Google, or to your bank, or to wherever you put in your details and then they start draining your accounts or stealing your identity.
Number two is the Crypto Locker, this ones really bad, it’s also called Ransom Wear. And that is when your computer becomes encrypted, or the files get locked down and you have to pay a ransom of some sort, whether it be a bitcoin or something else to actually get the code to un-encrypt all of your files. They’ve been around for a couple years now and they’re getting pretty nasty. The traditional virus, which destroys apps on your computer, starts to serve you ads and popups, yeah sure some of them would try and steal your information or log your key strokes, but the kind of older school viruses have taken a bit of a back seat to these two new threats.
So do you still need the anti virus software on your computer? Yes it’s still a good idea if you’re on a Windows machine or if you’re on a Mac. So on a Windows machine they’re the most susceptible. Macs to a much lesser extent but there are still Mac viruses also. But if you are on a Chromebook you’re going to be fine, don’t need to worry about it because there are no known viruses. There are some vulnerabilities in Chrome but no known major viruses on Chrome OS2 warrants installing anti virus software on a Chromebook.
What about mobiles? That’s an interesting question and people ask us about that. There are third party solutions which can help keep your mobile locked down, that can monitor your browsing and those kind of things. If you’re on IOS I probably wouldn’t bother. I’d be careful with the apps that you’re downloading. I wouldn’t jailbreak the device or anything like that, not really necessary these days. But IOS is pretty darn tight because the API’s are all really tightly controlled by Apple. On an Android device you may consider it, but I don’t personally bother. If you are downloading apps from the Google Play store if you’re on Android most apps now are Google verified so there’s a Play Store protect, it’s a verification process for apps that apps go through and Google kind of okays them before they then go into the app store. And if you’re only downloading popular apps like Instagram, and Google Suite of apps, maybe Facebook, and maybe your bank app, and those kind of things you’re probably going to be safe. If you’re the kind of person who downloads third party apps or random apps from the internet from outside of the Google Play App Store then you might consider an anti virus solution, but if not you’re probably going to be fine.
How do you protect yourself against Crypto Locker and Phishing on a local machine? Let’s say you’ve got a Windows machine or you’ve got a Mac and you want to protect your desktop, that’s a good idea. The recommended solution that we have is called Web Route and that’s cloud based anti virus software. What that does, well it’s kind of cloud hybrid. What that does is it does most of the thinking and the threat analytics in the cloud online, so it doesn’t use up so much of the energy of your local machine. And then what it does is it delivers those updates and analytics multiple times a day down to your local computer, which means that it’s quite a lightweight load on the local machine. Most of the hard work has been done in a cloud like everything these days, and it means that you still get really good protection from Crypto Lockers and from Phishing. And Web Route in particular is one of the best rated solutions to actually protect you against those Crypto Locker viruses. It’s not completely infallible, there are still ways that you can … if you open up an email attachment and the scanner doesn’t quite get to it, you force open that document in Outlook for example, then you can still get a computer that Crypto Lockered.
What do you do? If you still have that potential risk of having a Crypto Locker virus on your computer how do you protect against that? Now, backup is of course important but these days I don’t really recommend a local backup. They’re a little bit hard to manage, no one remembers to plug in the USB drive in to do it, every now and again when something does go wrong you’re going to go, “Oh crap, I haven’t backed up in the last two months.” And for business owners that like to move around quite a lot it’s just a little bit of a pain. Also, times that by 20 if you’ve got 20 staff and 20 computers in the office, gets a little bit messy.
The philosophy that I have instead is put everything into your Google G Suite. Google Drive, Google Docs, if you’ve got Microsoft files still hanging around in the business that’s fine, put them all into Google Drive and then protect your Google account. Because if your local desktop is backed up to Google using Google Backup and Sync, if all of your files are sitting inside of Google Drive then you’re able to basically just backup that Google Suite and then you’ve got everything taken care of. If a Crypto Locker hits you, if a Phishing attack hits you then you’re more likely to be protected within the Google ecosystem. What tool do we use for that? That is Backupify and I’ve done a separate video on Backupify, which I will happily link below for you guys so you can learn about how that helps protect your data when you’re utilizing G Suite.
You might be saying, “Well Pete, what about Phishing? How do I stop myself from clicking on a bad link and having that open up and me potentially put my information into there?” Well Phishing with your Google account if you switch on two factor authentication, then two factor authentication will actually protect 99% of the phishing problems that happen when someone tries to get into your Google account. I can’t protect you unfortunately from going to a site that looks like your bank site and putting in your bank details, you’re going to have to be vigilant with that one, but Google Span Filtering does a pretty darn good job of filtering out most phishing attempts. And also, you have the added protection of two factor authentication on your Google account, which is available for free if you need to protect your Google account, which we strongly, strongly recommend.
All right, cool. Quick recap. Do you still need anti virus? On a Mac and on a PC probably a good idea. On a mobile device you’re probably going to be fine as long as you’re using popular apps from either the IOS or the Android app store. If you are interested in anti virus for your Mac or your PC Web Route, my team can help get you hooked up with that so just send us a message down below and we’ll be more than happy to help out with that, or you can visit ITGenius.com and our team will get in touch. But if you want to get everything backed up in your cloud world inside of G Suite we recommend Backupify, and that’s going to help get everything sorted there. Till next time catch you later.
Leave any comments right below the video and we’ll catch you the next one, cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
