To Scan or Not to Scan; The Proactive Way to Protect Your PC

Another day, another major hack.

This time around, India-based outsourcing giant Wipro was hit with a devastating phishing attack that left their network wide open to a state-Sponsored malware attack. To make matters much, much worse, though you may not be familiar with it, Wipro provides IT and consulting services to enterprises all over the world — and their network was used to launch subsequent attacks that targeted a wide range of their own customers, a list that includes aerospace, financial, healthcare and defense customers.

More Time = More Damage

According to famed security blogger Brian Krebs, bad actors infiltrated Wipro’s networks a few months ago after falling prey to an advanced phishing attack. The company denies this, saying that the malware only sat on their networks about a week before they located it, and once they found it, they took all the necessary measures to ensure none of their internal or external users were breached.  Obviously, the longer malware sits undetected, the more opportunity it has to cause damage. This is just as true for home PC users as it is by big enterprises. Once malware has the chance to infiltrate, it moves through your network, and depending on the nature of the attack, either gather information, encrypts data, or performs some other damaging behavior. Either way, the longer its there, the worse it is for you.

There are a bunch of things going on behind the scenes once malware has made its way onto your computer. After the initial infection, it then probes your system, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit so that it can gain entry. Once it finds them, it can begin to do whatever nefarious processes it was designed for. And the longer it’s there undetected, the more damage it can cause. This is why it’s critical to have an anti-malware and antivirus scanner set up and ready to go. In our case, we implore our users to set Reason’s anti-malware: windows 10, Vista, 8, XP or other OS types, to run a quick scan, daily.

The Benefits of Regular Scanning

From the moment your PC gets compromised, the clock is ticking. Running regular scans with a powerful scanner that locates emerging-malware variants as well as known threats is the very best way to prevent malware from gaining a foothold in your system.

And it’s not only viruses that get routed out — Trojans, ransomware, phishing threats, rootkits, and backdoors are all fair game for a capable scanner. By setting up a daily scan, you’re ensuring that these threats get blocked at their earliest stages. When you set up Reason Antivirus, you’re getting an automatic scanner, which will scan your computer on a daily basis, as well as an on-demand scanner which lets you search out threats whenever you think you may have been compromised. And it’s even more versatile than that — with Reason, you can scan your PC in three ways — quick, full and custom. Let’s take a look at what each one is meant for.

Quick Scan
This is the recommended scan – it scans the most vulnerable folders and files, the ones that are typical targets for viruses and other malware variants. This scan takes just a few minutes and is the best way to get fast peace of mind, knowing that your PC is now free of threats.

Full Scan
The full scan scans your entire PC, looking in each nook and cranny for threats. It searches your storage, memory and even connected external devices, as well as files and folders to find hard-to-detect threats.

Custom Scan
The custom scan allows you to choose which folders/files you’d like to scan. Use this kind of scan if you suspect that a certain file may be infected. Scanning your PC with Reason AV is simple — Just choose the kind of scan you’re looking for, click it and let the scan do its thing. When it’s finished, you’ll get a report detailing the threats that were found (if any exist). It will alert you to the severity of the threats and let you know if it should be quarantined and removed.

Scanning for Continuous Protection

It’s hard to be sure just what happened at Wipro and understand how malware was able to infiltrate into one of the most prominent outsourcing companies in the world. What we do know for sure is that an exploit made its way past their defenses and wasn’t found until it was way too late. The lesson to be learned? Make sure that your network is protected from falling prey to the same rotten fate with regular scanning. To find out more about Reason Antivirus and how we protect your network with scanning and other innovative features, visit us at Reason Cybersecurity.