Malware is now a multibillion dollar enterprise often ran by organised crime syndicates, most of them based in the Eastern Bloc countries, China, India and Russia. These cyber criminals target everything from bank accounts, corporate data, network passwords and data for use in identity theft, and are no longer benign; they can now infect with impunity everything from your PC to your CISCO routers. Malware is now routinely used to retrieve personal or corporate data without the knowledge of the person or organisation and it has become very sophisticated. 

Many business owners and managers still don't fully understand that viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other bits of digital nastiness are also serious budget eaters. The cost of cleaning up a malware infection might be a few thousand dollars in terms of labour if you’re lucky, but if a hacker uses that piece of malware to sniff passwords and gains access to the corporate network, the indirect or secondary damages could be enormous.

Down time is a serious consideration, should the one of the more modern digital nasties, just the time taken in deep scanning can take several days, the below figures represent expected deep scanning times, cleaning the data can take any where from 1hour to 1 day once the issues are found.

• 24>36 hours for a Stand alone PC
• 24>48 hours for a Server
• 24 hours > 7 days for a Storage Device of 2TB or more

It’s easy to be a scare monger however given today's hostile internet and lack of understanding of modern digital threats coupled with poor user practices, these treats are very real so the solutions should be too.