Malware

Malware is any program written to harm you, or to work for someone else while it sits on your computer. The word covers several kinds. A virus copies itself into other files and spreads. Spyware sits quietly and sends back what you type, passwords included. A trojan pretends to be something useful, a free invoice tool or a photo editor, and does its real job in the background.

Almost all of it arrives in four ordinary ways. The first is an attachment in an email that looks like an invoice, a delivery note or a CV. The second is a fake update, where a page tells you your browser or your video player is out of date and the file you download is the malware itself. The third is a USB stick, handed over by a customer or found in a car park and plugged in without a thought. The fourth is cracked software, a paid program taken free from a forum with a small extra program hidden inside.

None of those four needs anyone to break anything. They need one person, once, in a hurry.

Antivirus helps and you should have it. But it mostly recognises what it has seen before, and attackers change their files daily to stay unfamiliar. So antivirus is one lock on one door, not a plan. The rest of the plan is dull and it works. Staff who can spot a bad attachment. Updates installed the week they come out. A daily account that is not allowed to install programs. And a backup kept where an infected machine cannot reach it.

The surprise is the bill for the time, not for the cleaning. A shop with an infected till loses the afternoon. An office loses the file everyone shares. When Linkysoft is called in after an infection, most of the work is finding out what the program touched and which passwords have to change, and that is slow. A short cybersecurity review costs a fraction of it. The business systems Linkysoft builds keep a record of who signed in and what they changed, which is exactly what makes that clean-up quick instead of guesswork.