Stop The Grinch From Stealing Your Holidays

The stores have been dropping hints now for a few weeks – the holidays are nearly here! Time to get ready! Time to think about what to buy. The children on your list are easy, but what do you get for those who seem to have everything or say they don’t need anything? You contemplate, you worry, you do the math, you fight the crowds, you search for those perfect gifts and you hope you made the right decision. If you’re like me, it just wears you out thinking about it. If there were only an easy answer to the gift giving questions—something that would be a welcomed surprise, original and useful.

Here’s a novel idea:  Superior PC AntiVirus protection that won't slow your computer down.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. “Well, that’s different.” But, admit it, you have to give it an “A” for originality. It’s definitely useful. And it would be a surprise – who would ever expect to receive a gift of AntiVirus software? You have to admit it hits all the big criteria for a great present!

Think about it. How many of your family members and friends have a home PC? And what do they do with it? Surf the Internet, shop online, play games, Facebook, Twitter, watch funny videos, movies or TV shows, keep the family finances, do taxes, store family photos? 

All it takes is for one virus to infect a family PC and everything can be lost:  precious photos, financial records and hard to replace files like your address book. Using email and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, playing online games and even surfing the Net are sources of all sorts of dangerous viruses that can infect one PC and then spread to others. These viruses do Grinchy things ranging from stealing information as you type (keyloggers) or lifting data off your hard drive (Trojans) to locking up your computer to wiping out your hard drive.

And it happens more often than you think, because an estimated 40% to 60% of PCs are completely vulnerable. Most new computers come equipped with a 30- to 90-day trial version of an anti-virus software package. More often than not, when the trial expires it doesn’t get upgraded to the paid version. At that point, the PC becomes completely unprotected. The danger is so prevalent that according Microsoft’s 2010 Security Intelligence Report over 2.2 million PCs in the U.S. are infected by botnet viruses. A botnet is a group of computers infected by a Trojan virus that can be used for spamming and mass credit card fraud, among other things. It can take less than five minutes of time online for a Trojan to take hold of an unprotected computer and use it for illicit activities—and the owners rarely suspect it

Fortunately, Immunet developed a new way to keep personal PCs safe. Immunet’s Collective Immunity™ technology uses the power of the Internet (the “Cloud”) to create a network protection effect that keeps your PC and the computers of your friends and family safe online. Each time a virus is blocked on one computer in the Immunet Community ALL other computers are instantly protected from the same virus, increasing the speed and level of virus protection with each new member. This collaborative approach uses “strength in numbers” that grows smarter with each new community member.

Immunet Protect Free is today’s most innovative cloud-based anti-viral software for protecting your PC and social network against cyber threats from around the world. Within seconds of downloading it, you gain the protection produced by every other PC in the Immunet Community around the world—now nearly 700,000 strong, including Vatican City. Even CNET is singing its praises, giving it at 4.5 star rating (out of 5) and saying it provides “…an extra dose of peace of mind” in a June 2010 review.  Immunet Protect is up to 35 times lighter than traditional antivirus solutions, which take up between 100 and 350 megabytes of disk space and causes performance slowdowns. In contrast, Immunet Protect uses only 10 megabytes of space, to keep PCs running at optimal speeds.

Here’s another important point to consider:  Unlike traditional antivirus products, which reside on PC hard drives, and take between one and 14 days to gather, analyze and deliver updates—often after the threat has mutated, Immunet identifies viruses in real-time and continually delivers antivirus protection via an Internet connection to its community of Immunet Protect users as soon as they’re identified. And because Immunet can work alone or along with other anti-virus software, you don’t have to worry about a conflict when giving it as a gift.

Spread the Gift of PC Protection

For just $19.95, you can surprise your friends and family members with this season’s most original and useful gift:  a one-year subscription of Immunet Protect Plus. It provides everything that Immunet Protect Free provides, plus a host of extra goodies like enhanced virus removal, the ability to schedule virus scans, offline scanning that protects PCs even when they’re disconnected from the Internet, and more. (And you’ll stay well within your budget!) 

To purchase Immunet Protect Plus, click here.

You can then use our gift certificate to give Immunet Protect to your most trusted friends!

Happy Holidays!

Companies Are Taking Responsibility for the Security of Their Own Online Communities

Recently, some articles in the mainstream press caught my eye because they were consistent with a change I’ve noticed in the way the world is reacting to the persistent, and perhaps growing, threats to PC security.  The trend I am noticing is an increasing effort by companies to take responsibility for the community of users that they support.  This is in contrast to the ‘every person for him(her)self approach that has been there from the beginning and still predominates.  

Comcast has been a leader in taking responsibility for their users’ security.  For a few years now they have offered antivirus protection to their subscribers for free - or rather included with their monthly fee for their ISP service. Subscribers were able to download and use an off-the-shelf antivirus product for every computer in their home at no extra charge.  It’s a nice service and is a good way for Comcast to encourage good security habits of it’s subscriber base.  What we don’t know is how many people took advantage of this offer, but presumably a fair number did.  Facebook is another high-profile company that is starting to take responsibility for the security of their users by promoting an antivirus solution.

Now Comcast is taking on more responsibility for their users’ security.  A September 30, 2010 NY Times entitled  “Comcast to Protect Customer’s Computers from Malware” describes how Comcast is taking the responsibility for ensuring an additional level of protection for their subscribers.  A link to the article is here.   In this latest development, Comcast is taking the protection they offer their subscribers a step further and applying a network-wide effort to detect, and shut down botnets.  Botnets are only a piece of the security puzzle - others include identity theft, data theft, data loss - but they are an increasingly important piece and the approach of taking advantage of a network-wide view of the problem has a lot of advantages.

In any event, Comcast has several incentives for taking on the responsibility for better security.  One is so that they can provide a better, more appealing service and help maintain their brand.  Another if financial.  Much of the traffic that travels over their networks is a direct result of malware.  Eliminating it allows them to provide better service to legitimate users with less investment in faster networks.  

Scott Charney, Microsoft's corporate vice president for trustworthy computing takes this community responsibility for protecting people a step further.  The TG Daily article “Microsoft wants 'sick' PCs banned from the internet” found here, describes that Mr. Charney “argues that the world needs a common health policy that prevents malware-infected machines from connecting to the internet.  Mr. Charney explains that “"This approach involves implementing a global collective defense of internet health much like what we see in place today in the world of public health."  

Mr. Charney’s suggestion makes sense as a successful model to follow, but I suspect that before we see anything like this happen, we will see many more companies like Comcast and Facebook offer to help protect their communities closer to home.

Scheduled Outage - November 8, 2010

At 8:00 PM Mountain Standard the Immunet Cloud will experience fluctuations in connectivity due to scheduled maintenance. These outages will be experienced by different regions at different times and are expected to be intermittently in effect until 10:00 PM MST, November 8. Users in affected areas may experience their Immunet Product indicating it is in an 'Unconnected' state. The state will change once the outage is complete.

If you have any questions about this outage or continue to experience it past the proscribed time please contact support@immunet.com

Best Regards,

Team Immunet