14 DAY TRIAL // While many organizations have become aware of the importance of cyber security, a large number of companies falsely assume that their servers don’t need any protection because they’re not used to surf the Web.
Experts warn that such assumptions are a recipe for disaster.
“People browsing the Internet on endpoints have a higher chance of downloading something infected or causing a problem, but the piece they don’t know about is the behavior that malware code is looking to do,” noted Gill Langston, VIPRE sales manager, Americas, at ThreatTrack Security.
Langston warns that worms are designed to infect all the devices they find on a network. This means that servers can also become infected if a security solution is not deployed.
For instance, an infected file might be uploaded to a file server that’s shared with several other machines. Servers can also become infected if a plagued USB drive is plugged in.
“You could be carrying around an infection in your pocket. The number one point we always try to make is, in order to be fully protected you should have AV on every node and every OS within the environment. Period,” Langston added.
Even if they’re not regularly utilized, servers must have at least a minimum of protection. They might not run software that’s usually leveraged in cyberattacks, and they might not need products that contain features such as web filtering, patch management and firewalls.
However, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have some AV product installed on them. As Langston highlights, in many cases, organizations discover that the source of an infection is an old server that’s not used regularly.
“That’s why unprotected computer discovery is an important feature of AV. It can find that server that is probably the culprit for spreading infections,” the expert said.