As a business, you’re utterly reliant on your computer systems to perform their day to day functions. But, as we all know, computers can play up, things can go wrong, and our businesses can suffer. Sometimes computer problems are caused by corrupt hard drives, just with the programming software, or the fact that you’re using systems that are incompatible. And while these situations are annoying, they can hardly be called dangerous.
There are other times, however, when your company is deliberately targeted and sabotaged, which can lead to an outage of your computer systems or worse. Just look at the story breaking right now about the internet search giant Yahoo, where over a billion user accounts have been hacked.
Here are some tell-tale signs your business is infected with malware.
Programs And Tools Are Unavailable
What’s the first thing that most people do when they find that they are locked out of a program or can’t use a particular tool? They do the usual “ctrl, alt, delete.” Usually, simply restarting the program is enough to restore the situation to normal, but if your computer is infected by malware, the same problem will occur again.
Often malware will try to defend itself against being destroyed by closing off user tools to shut it down. An obvious example of this is when a certain program is hidden from Task Manager. If you can’t see a program using system resources, although you have a sneaking suspicion that it probably is, then it’s time to break out malware removal software. Unlike most anti-viruses, it’s a lot more specialized and able to go far deeper into your systems and root out problems.
You’re Locked Out Of Your Computer
One minute you’re merrily surfing the web, the next, you’ve been locked out of your computer or business network. Suddenly, you get a message on your screen telling you that you’ve been denied access to your business account, and services will only be restored if you pay a fee.
This is bad news. Either you pay the ransom money to a criminal hacker, or you spend hours trying to sort the problem out with your IT staff, disrupting your operations and ruining your company profitability.
The good news is that “ransomware” can be eliminated using sophisticated ransomware removal tools. Most businesses partner with specialist companies to help them avoid these very situations.
You Keep Getting Pop-Up Ads
Pop-ups ads are seriously annoying, and that’s why most modern browsers that your business is likely using have inbuilt pop-up ad protection. However, if you’re using a modern browser but still continue to see lots of ads, then you might have a problem with malware.
First thing’s first: check to see whether your browser is correctly configured. It should be set up to block pop-up ads so that your employee’s workflow isn’t interrupted. If it is, then the next step is to run a full scan using an anti-spyware tool. Spyware tools are able to weed out nasty programs which might be overriding the browser settings, allowing pop-ups to appear when they shouldn’t.
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