School Provided Anti-Virus

As many of us work our way through school we look for every means to keep a dollar in our pocket. Being we are all IS major, many of us spend the majority of their on either school or their home computers. Recently, after having my personal anti-virus expire, i was feeling less than eager to kick out another $49 for another years subscription.

Many of you don't know that Eastern has a partership with Mcafee to keep the school and its students pc's clean. Free Anti-virus . You can get access to the free 2 year subscription to Mcafee Corporate Edition. I greatly like the corporate versions of many kinds of software. I find them cleaner and with less flash in the pan. They tend not to be the most initially user friendly, but after some use often open up features you would of not had access to before in a retail copy.

The only downside is at this time the do not have a wholy compatible version for Win 7. Many users have simple installed the vista version with ease. Over time this creates system instability issues and improper firewall blocking by Win7 as well as incorrect file quarentine. Until the new compatible version becomes available there is always Panda!

Antivirus Scamming

I'm sure we have all came across a pop up window that claims that it is scanning your computer for viruses and then claims you have one. I have never trusted these pop up scanners because I never know where there come from and since I have an up to date antivirus running on my computer I always figure its some sort of scan to get people to spend money. Well recently the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a warning stating that a majority of these are in fact scams. They state that "At best, the software is subpar. At worst, it could result in viruses, Trojans and/or keyloggers being installed on the user's computer". It is estimated that by the FBI that victims of these scams have lost more than $150 million.

The FBI recommends that you do not click on these pop ups and should in fact close your browser immediately and possibly your computer. You should also run your antivirus to make sure there is nothing on your computer.

Security FAQ's website lists ways to help you identify fake antivirus programs:

• Fake anti-virus software will often find more suspicious activity on your computer than those programs that are made by legitimate companies.
• The number of pop-ups you see will increase drastically, even when you are not connected to the internet.
• After installing the fake anti-virus program you may notice that your computer slows down drastically due to the amount of junk that has been installed onto your system.
• You may also find that your default homepage has been changed and now points to the scammer’s ‘official-looking’ site.
• Words on websites are now underlined and now hyperlink to undesirable locations, such as adult sites.

Of course the best possible way to prevent these scams is to never use any of these sort of antivirus programs and use only the one you have installed on your computer.