Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: She Bop, We Bop-a-CLNC® Bop, Is Your PC a Bot?

As a world traveler I’ve seen and dodged my fair share of viruses. Except for that one incident in Nepal with the unpasteurized cheese, I’ve done pretty well. That being said, as a World Wide Web traveler, I’ve also dodged my fair share of viruses, malware and other nasty infections (so far as I know). Others, including more than a few legal nurse consultants I’ve spoken with haven’t been so lucky. Even my remote family isn’t immune. I once spent a full day of my Christmas vacation rebuilding my brother-in-law’s laptop after he contracted something extremely nasty from practicing unsafe-surfing. I eventually had to wipe his computer clean and reinstall Windows^® and advise him to stay off the Internet for the rest of his life.

There’s a lot more than viruses out there. I could spend hours talking about Internet risks including malware, malicious downloads, poisoned websites, Trojan horses and other nasties. Hopefully every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant is running some form of Internet protection software such as McAfee Total Protection or Norton Internet Security. It’s not enough to have good front-end protection, you should also scan your computer on a regular basis to see if it has become part of a botnet.

Botnets consist of average-Joe or average-Josephine computers that have become infected with a virus or other malware which allows a third party (bad guy) to take over that computer and use it for various nefarious purposes. The computer you use in your legal nurse consulting business gets infected by visiting a website that injects it with malware, you download a free “flash player update” to view that LOLcat video or run a free “virus scan” from one of those pop-ups that tells you “your computer is at risk” (yes Virginia, people really do click on those). Newer attack sites can even detect and attack both Windows and Mac systems.

Botnets can be run from a central point and are often used for criminal purposes. Some can be as simple as hosting a phishing site (sites that pretend to be a bank or credit card site and keep moving from infected computer to infected computer to stay ahead of security services). Other purposes include stealing your passwords, sending out spam, including your computer in a DDoS attack or just repropagating itself by sending out more versions of the bad email to infect more and more computers and build a bigger and bigger botnet. Botnets have already been involved in cyber-wars in the ex-Soviet states and will certainly be involved in future cyber-wars.

What’s the relevance to legal nurse consultants? Well it’s a big one. You need to keep your computers from becoming foot soldiers in these future wars. This is more than running anti-viral software. Many infected computers actually show clean antivirus scans.

To scan your legal nurse consulting business’s computer for bot infections, every CLNC^® consultant should download Microsoft’s free Malicious Software Removal Tool. Once installed it runs in the background (meaning you’re not aware it’s running) and once a month it reports to you as it finds and removes infections. Any time you want to be sure the Removal Tool is working, you can go back to the download page and run it yourself on the spot. It’s not a perfect tool but it is a good one. Is there a perfect tool? Not yet.

There are other tools out there but be careful. A lot of computers get infected because the owner installs bad software thinking it’s a real anti-whatever tool. Keep the software you purchase for your legal nurse consulting business limited to products from the big boys – Symantec, Kapersky, McAfee or Microsoft and you should be okay.

As soon as you get done reading this – visit that Microsoft site and run a scan today.

Keep on techin’,