Best practices to employ for mitigation of malware effects on systems and devices

With so much rapid technologies changes, the cyber-attacks have increased recently such as phishing, denial of service, password attack, cross-scripting attacks etc. We should take precautions to be wary of such activities and keep our systems secure for our personal as well as the office devices as mainly companies are targeted to obtain sensitive customer and financial information. Malware means harmful software that can provide access to outside agent to our device and disrupt the organization at network level. Malware can infect our system in various ways such as viruses, spyware etc.

The best practices to employ to mitigate malware effects on a machine are –

1. We should keep our software updated, maintained and have anti-viruses updated. It helps to shield our device from malware's.

2. Firewalls help to ensure network security, helps to authorize communication between two systems that are in use as it will check the connection based in its rules and then decides.

3. We should be wary of the emails as they can be corrupted and help to install spyware in our systems. They can be attached in email and harm our computers.

4. We should also keep our system backed up frequently as it helps us to keep our data safe as well as verified it on a regular basis. We should keep our backup in a different system so that we don’t lose it due to soma malware attacks.

5. Before installing any software or update we should have requisite to ask for admin right to allow it to install. As it allows user permission before installing any software.

Conclusion

It is a good practice to safeguard from malware's using VPN or VM while using secure and sensitive data and information, Virtual Machines help to avoid getting infected from viruses and reduces chances of being attacked. Due to recent development in cloud computing and storage, it is also efficient to use them to safeguard data and have a back. As per your detailed discussion I would add one more point, it is also good practice to use sandbox, lot of software-based companies make it mandatory to use sandbox while out of secure network and they also make trainings compulsory before using sandbox as it makes user more aware of the attacks that can happen in future if precautions are not take. But use of sandbox is effective as its lightweight, it may be complex initially for e.g. using same file outside of the sandbox may take more efforts, but it saves from malware. Similarly, in case of VM as it creates an isolated machine, gives independence to choose Operating system and you can setup network access to share the files between the host and VM.