One of the more common ways that computer users pick up malware and viruses is through web browsing. Often times, users are not trying to be malicious, they are trying to accomplish something constructive. Perhaps they are searching for the latest update for Adobe Reader and click on the first link they see without checking to make sure the site is really Adobe. If it is not a legitimate site, users can easily download viruses or malware unwittingly. This malware can cause the business a loss of productivity and real dollars to combat and clean up. This scenario is repeated across businesses everywhere every day.
The good news is there are tools to help prevent this type of problem from occurring at your business. We will focus on two in this post. The first is our web protection tool. Web protection is a program that runs behind the scenes on your computers and compares Internet sites against a list of known bad sites or sites your company has chosen to block. In the example above, the user would receive a message that the site they clicked on has been blocked for their protection. Web protection offers a lot of flexibility for a business. Management can create different policies for different users. For example, if a company wanted to block social media sites but allow it for their marketing team so company sites can be kept up to date, that is possible. Not every user should have the same policies and web protection offers that flexibility.
There is another tool available as well for safer browsing called Application Guard. If you have Windows 10 and the appropriate hardware behind it, Application Guard can be activated within Microsoft’s Edge browser. Application Guard will essentially open web pages in the Edge browser in a contained virtual environment. Anything that happens in the session stays within the session and dies with the session. This means any malware infections would corrupt the virtual browser and not infect the computer itself. Simply closing the Application Guard browser kills the virtual machine and any infections along with it. In technical circles, Application Guard is referred to as a sandbox. You can play in the sandbox and what happens there stays there. (Sounds like a catch phrase for a certain city in Nevada doesn’t it?) Application Guard is not turned on by default and there is some thought that should be put behind it before deployment.
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