Meanwhile back at the ranch .. 'ed is musing that things definately aren't always as bad as they appear to be, & that a little knowledge can be dangerous .. he's not so sure though whether more information will make things better or worse :D ...
So definately do some work on finding yourself some network capable AV software !
As far as firewall goes .. we established you have a router which ought to give a certain level of protection 'natively' (that's just by being a 'device' to be hacked instead of a computer - from the outside anything with an ip looks like a computer - but a router doesn't have all the windows services running {with all their vulnerabilities} to get hacked, so its more secure - also the bit about 'filter messages and forward them to different places based on various criteria' helps muchly too ) ... however one thing a hardware firewall doesn't do that a software firewall can is 'application white listing' - hardware firewalls only stop 'ins' (whether they cost $100 or $100k) - software can block 'outs' !!! This is very important to at least realise.
All that spyware etc you've been removing from machines has been happily dialing home past your hardware firewall & maybe 'dialing back in' too, as if you 'phone out' as far as your hardware firewall is concerned, then any 'ins' resulting from that are ok too, as you 'said' the 'out bit' was okay ...
Two approaches .. software firewall capable of running on a network (or a 'white list' application control program - run only 'good' stuff I told you about), &/or get 'hardening' your group policies .. so Huh ? You need to make it impossible for users to introduce the stuff in the first place - so that means making sure users can't install 'random crap' from wherever, & only the admin or 'whoever' can add programs by changing their write permissions for new stuff - both is 'best practice' ;)
Maybe you also want to do a cost/benefit analysis of what it would cost your company if they were without this 'server' with your payroll etc on it for how ever long ... I dunno whether it might make sense if its a minute its off (I have clients where 30 seconds might be critical) or a day or even a month ..
As for this bit... I'll 'contra' that with 'A wise man knows the limits of his knowledge ..' ;)Quote:
I have at least learned enough to know I know very little
