PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Help! Tech S.O.S (Off topic) Third Party Tune-up and Security. What do Forum Members Think About it?

I would say so, yes. I do part time work for the CPA firm that I retired from 4 years ago. Given the sensitivity of clients tax iand financial nformation and federal laws about safeguarding that information, security is very important. Our IT company uses Defender plus close monitoring of activity on our server. I've talked to their tech people many times about this and Defender is as good as anything else meaning none are perfect.

The biggest problem with security? A brain dead user who isn't paying attention to spam email attachments. Some are very clever, they make the email look exactly like it's coming from your bank with logos, disclaimers and everything else you would see. The one thing is it says something like they need you to to log in because there's been an issue with your account and to please click here. Noooo!!! The best software security ever made won't help if you click on that link.

Many times I would see a suspicioius email and call them about it. They would hop on my system, click on it themselves and tell me, yep good catch. That email originated in Romania or something. Some of the spam emails I get are extremely clever, they will use a very close aproximatiion of my name or a client's name or a company I work with but something about it just doesn't look right so I'll call our people and check it out. One was really amazing, it looked exactly like one of our clients sending some docs and just click to download the pdf's. I never got a call from them saying they were sending it so I didn't do it. You have to really have your BS detector going full time!

Aside from that, the single biggest thing you can do is to have a modern computer meaning a few years old with the latest Windows version and keep it fully updated because every update includes security patches. The second thing is to keep your system clean. Time and again the people who seem to have the most problems are the ones who think they know better and keep messing with their systems thinking they're making it "better". If you're a true computer pro, maybe you can get away with that but usually you're just making things worse. Microsoft knows what they're doing in spite of all the nag screens to use Edge and such. Which btw, Edge is more secure according to our IT people which is why they don't allow any other browsers to be installed on the office system.

Here's the thing, starting with Win 10 and now 11, the OS, Defender, Edge and your mobo/CPU are all integrated for security. Many people don't care that much about it. Fine, their choice. If you do care then this is the way to go.

Bob