This entry is part of the series Ten things you can do to improve IT security and reliability without spending money

By now, most people have installed some sort of anti-virus software on their computers.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that we often we find that the software subscriptions are allowed to lapse, or not renewed, so the user will stop getting updates.  Sometimes it’s because a new computer was delivered with a six- or twelve-month free subscription, then the user did not purchase the renewal.  Or sometimes we find that for some reason the anti-virus has been turned off, or is otherwise not working properly.

So the first thing to do is to check on what antivirus software you are using today, and make sure that (a) the subscription is up-to-date, (b) you are in fact receiving the updates, and (c) that the updates are actually being applied to every PC and server in your organization.

There are free anti-virus software products available, including AVG (see http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage).

Also, in addition to anti-virus software, we recommend that you also have some sort of anti-spyware or anti-malware software installed on every PC.  To go a step further on this point, we recommend placing a link to that software on every user’s desktop, so they can launch it immediately when the need arises.  We recommend MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (see http://www.malwarebytes.org/ ) for this purpose, and they do have a free version.