How Internet Security Works for Small Businesses

The Basics

Small business internet security suites software is designed to protect small business networks from spam, viruses, spyware, bots, phishing, inappropriate Web sites and other security threats. Read our other articles to find out more detail about how these threats work and why they are considered threatening.

Anti-spam, Web Reputation and URL filtering are some of the ways small businesses can be protected from online threats:

• Anti-spam programs filter incoming e-mail for spam as well as viruses, spyware, bots, phishing and other malware.
• Web Reputation helps you determine which sites are safe to visit and blocks known unsafe or undesired sites.
• URL filtering blocks out inappropriate or non-work related Web sites that could expose employees to offensive Web content known to distribute malware.

Unified Threat Management

The best way to secure your small business network begins with a server – no business is too small to consider aligning itself around a server – with a server your confidential and critical files can be stored in controlled locations and accessed only by employees who have been granted the special access. This way, who is accessing and when and from where is easily tracked. Servers also offer the possibilities of redundant drives, external storage options, automatic backups and archives.

Once you have a server, you control all of your employee’s access to the Internet and all applicable network files from one single point of entry. The next step is a firewall and a gateway – powerful screening areas that examines and permits or denies access to all incoming and outgoing information on the server. This is where antivirus software comes in: the firewall is nothing without an antivirus program.

An antivirus program works quite simply by analyzing incoming information and cleansing malicious code when it is detected. In the industry, the combination of a firewall, gateway, antivirus and intrusion detection and prevention capabilities on a single platform are known as Unified Threat Management (UTM).

Detecting Malicious Programs

In the antivirus industry there are three main ways antivirus software works to detect the difference between a regular executable file and malware: pattern matching, heuristics detection and code signing/whitelisting.

Pattern matching looks at the command being issued to the processor and attempts to match it to every other file in order to diagnose whether it is a valid program or something mean and nasty. Seems simple enough, but in the face of comparing the thousands of executable computer programs on a machine against the 400,000 viruses out there, pattern matching can be hideously excessive use of the processor. Also, if the virus is new or unknown, there’s nothing to compare it to.

Instead of looking for a pattern, heuristics detection looks at the way a program behaves and how it acts to make a guess about whether it is good or bad. A behavior scanner keeps a lookout for a series of known actions used by viruses. A sandbox scanner executes the program inside a safe zone (sandbox) to judge how it affects other files inside the sandbox. A proper hacker can easily trick these kinds of systems, though.

Whitelisting is the practice of telling your system exactly which programs can be allowed in. This is the hardest type of prevention method to beat but is only as good as the quality of programs accepted onto the list.

The best small business security suites software combine all three of these detection/prevention methods in an attempt to throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks.

If you don’t already have a trusted IT professional to advise you, protecting your small business network and Internet presence can seem daunting. Never fear – it’s not impossible. Be sure to read our side-by-side comparisons of the latest and greatest in small business security suites antivirus software.

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