One for the IT bods
 

It would appear that as Xmas approaches there are more and more virus's about. So far this year I have had to re-format kids computers 8 or 9 times!

We run 4 computers off of a wireless hub. Mine is the business machine and I am running Norton which scans and updates every night it runs on a LAN cable. The others are all running AVG Free Version with LAN. One of these has never had a virus, and surprise susprise it's Elaine's biz laptop which is wireless. The kids however are getting loads.

How can I best protect everyone but not increase my own vulnerability? Should I run the hub straight onto a "server" with Norton installed and take everyone off that, or is it simply that kids go onto more risky sites, MSN etc and it's simply par for the course?

Worried of Nottingham...............

If you protect your kids PCs effectively, they will be constantly coming to you to say that this site does work or that programme doesn't work, etc. It is in the nature of kids to download every stupid thing under the sun.
You can either lock up their PCs with an effective anti-virus/firewall solution, and have them complain that nothing is working, or just let them do what they want and re-format their drives every so often.
There doesn't seem to be any third choice, to me, anyway.

Loz is about right. I gave up with the g/f's puta that her lads kept loading viruses onto. I locked it down, turned IE6 off, substituted Firefox for it instead, gave them restricted user rights etc. End of virus/malware problems until they complained about restrictions on sites and software they wanted to install so, she gave them the admin account details.... :rolleyes:

I don't bother sorting it out anymore...now they complain about a slow pc, pop-ups an long boot times...

Of course, to protect yourself you could put together a Smoothwall firewall, hide urself on the green interface and let them reside on the orange interface or DMZ....effectively letting them do what they want but keeping them locked out of your secure side of the LAN. At least your business machine will have some degree of safety. Make sure they don't have access to your shares otherwise their infected machine/s could open a whole can of worms re. your data security.

Had someone do this to my kids pc's once - and everything ground to halt eventually.

Funny thing was - since he went, no problems at all, no viruses, no issues, both pc's have run great without issue for over 2 years now. I'm no IT bod but once all what had been done was undone we've had no problems and i've not had to get any of our pcs touched by anyone since.

Go figure :rolleyes:

All my files are "not shared", so hopefully that stops that, but I haven't a clue what you are on about re Smoothwall, DMZ, Orange etc! Kin 'ell, gie a bloke a chance eh! (-:

1 Install an anti-virus (eg AVG Free) and ensure it is on a cycle to auto-update. An out of date anti virus is as good as not having one.
2 Install a spyware protection program (eg SpyBot or Windows Defender) and again ensure they are kept upto date.
3 Setup the kids with accounts that have NO install priviledges - and don't tell them the admin password! That way if the user can't delete or install then neither can any virus that sneaks in.
4 Ensure that your kids understand what they are doing. This is THE most important part! Explain that they shouldn't run *anything* at all. All the software they need is already installed. If they really need to install something then tell them that they only have to ask and you will once you've checked it, and keep this promise. Teach them about the tricks used by the virus writers to socially engineer people into accepting to install dodgy software and so that they can learn for themselves what is right and wrong - this is the best anti-virus you can use!

John, all the advice above is good, but you're a bit misguided with your setup, unless you have Norton Corporate/Enterprise edition this cannot be pushed out to the other machines, it's a standalone version you have so you would need to install this on all machines and update on all machines. I would suggest using different AV's across the machines though to give a more blended approach if for example virus A comes along Norton might not detect it, whereas AVG would then virus B might get picked up by Norton but not AVG if you see what I'm getting at.

Sounds like sound advice. Have taken the Antonye approach coupled with your own. At least my AV is up to date daily and virus checked every night.

We now have two dead 'puters indoors!

Yep, I've been a victim of this and its crept in and wipped the boot sector.

Being a my laptop was a prize winner it didn't come with a XP disc but only the software loaded and sticker/serial no underneath!!

Tried re-loading another copy and its got worse, first it didn't find the second copies boot sector, then the drive failed altogether and the machine wont see it!!!

I had Avast and whatever PC world supply with the machine anti-virus software, it got by all them, must be one of those hundreds of **** emails you get everyday!!

I didn't save my email contacts either, which has caused the biggest problem.... tried saving a number of times, but failed!!!

Be careful, I'm gonna spend xmas re-loading a new drive with all my software and a external drive for data ;)

Andy