Antivirus and Console Tools: Practical Application

Now, let’s take a look at this. This is Sophos. And this is a home version. It’s not too far from the enterprise version. This is a console that you can log into through the browser. It’s a cloud-based one. And the reason I chose this one is because Sophos is one of the ones out there that both the home version and the enterprise one will have a cloud console. Now, it’s pretty nice here. I’ve installed one machine. If I had, say, saved to 10 machines, I could see all 10 machines here. You can see the device name. You could remove it. And the first tab here, we could see the different statuses, antivirus protection. We have green checks all across.

So that means the antivirus is running. The web protection’s on. Ransomware protection’s on - privacy protection, malicious traffic detection. Now let’s go through the rest of this here real quick. Now, up in here, if we want to add a new device, we can do New Device. We can configure each of these in here. If I click on there, we can toggle on and off Real-Time Protection, Malicious Traffic Detection. You can set up a Schedule Scans. We could put Exceptions in here. And also it has machine learning, which I believe most antiviruses nowadays will have that. We take a look at the Protection settings, play around with that.

Under Web Filtering, this particular antivirus home version allows us to do some level of web filtering. So this is a pretty basic, pretty easy one to use. So if we go through here, we could - everything’s on the Allow list right now. But say this is on a child’s computer, and I do want to actually put some restrictions in. I could put weapons to warn, or block hacking. We can put a block, criminal activity block, alcohol, tobacco, adult and explicit block. And it’ll act much like a firewall. So this is a nice feature. Generally you see that more in the enterprise-level one, but is nice to see on the home one.

And in Statuses, you can also see different things that are happening. In here, we could see tracking cookies. We can see what’s going on with what the antivirus did find here.

And we also can do a clean if it did find something.

So free versus paid - free versions tend to catch, largely catch, the same viruses as the paid counterparts. They generally are running the same antivirus engine and the same updates. However, some free versions are intended for home use. So if you’re using this for your workplace, your enterprise machines, legally you may be obligated to buy the enterprise version, depending on the antivirus you’re using. Paid versions tend to offer a broader feature set and more granular control and also online console to monitor and distribute. Pay versions also tend to be easier to deploy across a managed network.

Wrapping up, antivirus software is a critical piece of software that should be used on any OS and network. It is a simple and effective way to protect yourselves. Enterprise, paid versions, tend to offer a broader amount of features, including easier management and distribution to the client. Always keep your antivirus up to date. You may need to play around the update settings and schedule it to avoid network congestion. After all, you probably don’t want 5,000 machines all updating at the same time or across the same LAN if your network is that large. Your Antivirus should be set to scan inbound at least and run a schedule for a full scan.

And again, you might need to adjust this to avoid conflicts with users. If a user’s doing a lot of work, you probably don’t want it scanning while they’re doing critical work at that time. The machine’s most likely going to slow down to some degree. And no matter how much you pay for antivirus software, there will be false positives or missed viruses. And you’ll likely need to play around with the settings, initially at least. So this was about antiviruses. In the next video, we’re going to talk about fake error messages and take a look at scareware and what it is. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.