This was brought up in a conversation I had recently with a senior director of a public company!
We were speaking about different levels of protection for work and home machines and whilst he could see the benefit and need to have in place multi layered protection on all workstations and servers, he wasn’t convinced about his own home machine being at risk.
I asked what he used his home machine for and he said, ’nothing really. I use it to send emails but that’s via a web based system, I might watch the odd thing or listen to music but mainly I use the Internet’.
This is where it gets interesting because when I asked what Internet surfing he does or sites he visits, it transpired lots of shopping takes place and all his banking is carried out online too.
I wondered how he would feel if I was able to log into his machine, capture his details and check on his accounts. Of course he wasn’t too thrilled about allowing this to happen and I pointed out that without decent protection that’s exactly what he’s potentially allowing to happen.
He’s a bright, commercially savvy and knowledgeable man, accessing his many bank accounts and also making numerous purchases from sites he’s visiting every week from a machine whose only protection is flimsy free antivirus software that doesn’t even offer support.
In this instance it didn’t take that much convincing to replace the free antivirus with a more robust premium service, in this case it was Depositit C360 Next-Gen Antivirus
This is not the first conversation I’ve had like this and I’m sure it won’t be the last, however it’s worth taking a step back and re-visiting the security in place on any of your home machines because though most feel there’s nothing of value on the computer or risks are minimal – when hard drives crash, the computer gets hacked or identity is stolen and bank accounts drained it is scary, time consuming, can damage your credit rating and at worst your livelihood.
It’s simply not worth the risk when upping your protection will quickly and easily safeguard against this threat!
Be safe, especially during these increasingly troubled times right now.
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