Do you trust your security to free antivirus products or is it really worth paying to protect your systems from infection?

Probably a question most people have pondered at some time or other. While not intending to go into an in-depth analysis of security products, it’s worth sharing some anecdotal experience.

Recently we were contacted by a business who had discovered almost half their PCs had picked up an infection which had “removed” essential files. This brought work to a standstill – hence their urgent call for help. We were able to recover the missing files, which had been hidden by the infection rather than removed. On closer analysis we found that all the PCs had been hit by the same infection, but around half had successfully recovered and removed the offending intrusion. In every case PCs which had failed to disinfect were running a free security suite and those that recovered were using ESET. As it happens ESET is one of the products we recommend as it’s effective without placing much load on the system it’s protecting.

The other point to the story is that this business had enough ESET licenses for all its PC but just hadn’t had time to make sure ESET had been deployed across all systems. That’s just one reason why our managed antivirus service is popular.