2018 October 04

Oct

Here are the 5 of the best antivirus solutions for your small business

Security problems are a fact of life in the corporate world. Increasingly, malicious hackers are targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in hopes of stealing information, obtaining credentials to sensitive accounts, or locking down the corporate network to stop companies from operating. The threats are real — and dangerous.

But ultimately stopping those threats can be difficult. Even the most secure corporate network is only as safe as the office’s least-security-conscious employee. And absent a sound slate of solutions to protect machines, there’s a very real chance hackers could run amok.

Antivirus solutions can often be an important first line of defense for small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the budget for a big IT department but still need protection. Antivirus protections won’t necessarily protect SMBs from any and all threats, but they will detect many of the attacks hackers are waging against the companies and thwart them before they cause problems.

But with a slew of vendors offering antivirus solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, choosing the best option can be difficult. So we’ve compiled the following list of five outstanding antivirus solutions that should make you and your company safer.

McAfee Endpoint Security

McAfee Endpoint Security is a popular security solution for the small business. And with a free trial before you need to plunk down cash, it’s a great place to start in your search for a solution.

McAfee Endpoint Security includes the basics you’d want from a solution, including antivirus protection and a built-in firewall. It also uses machine learning to identify code that might be trying to cause problems solely by the way it’s acting and appearing on your network. And if you want to stop zero-day malware, or malicious software that hasn’t yet been patched, you can contain it by blocking certain types of behaviors common in malware.

McAfee Endpoint security is an ideal solution for most individuals or companies from the sole proprietor to a mid-sized company. Prices will vary depending on the number of licenses you need and for how many years you sign up for a subscription.

Free Trial

BitDefender GravityZone Business Security

BitDefender GravityZone Business Security is another handy solution that comes with a free trial, so you can see what you’d be getting before you decide to spend cash.

The app is designed to protect you from a variety of threats, including malware, phishing scams, ransomware, and even zero-day exploits. You’ll also find the ability to grant or deny access to websites and applications to limit chances of those services causing problems.

Like some other solutions in this roundup, you’ll find that BitDefender’s GravityZone Business Security uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to continually monitor your network and find possible problems. And since much of that intelligence comes from the cloud, whenever it finds issues elsewhere, it informs its broader network to look out for similar problems. That all results in a faster response to new threats.

BitDefender’s software, which is designed for small and medium-sized business, is available with a free trial. After that, if you like what you see, you’ll pay $110 per year for up to three devices.

Free Trial

Norton Security Standard

Norton Security Standard is an ideal choice for anyone who wants to secure a single PC, Mac, or mobile device and doesn’t necessarily need all of the bells and whistles that would come with the higher-end options, like Norton Security Deluxe or Norton Security Premium.

Still, Norton’s Security Standard gets the job done on many fronts.

For one, you can use the software to protect against a rash of threats, including ransomware, viruses, spyware, and malware. And if you go online, the software will keep your financial and private information, like credentials, available from the prying eyes of hackers.

There’s a firewall baked into Norton Security Standard and you have full access to Norton security experts, who will walk you through solutions to problems when they might occur. In fact, Norton is so sure that its service works that if a Norton expert can’t keep your device free from malware, you’ll get a free refund.

Norton Security Standard is regularly available for $70 per device, per year. For the first year, you can take advantage of an introductory price of $40. It’s not really a corporate solution, so it wouldn’t be best for SMBs. It would, however, be an ideal solution for freelancers and other sole proprietors.

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Symantec Endpoint Protection 14

If you’re a fan of Symantec’s products but need something a little more sophisticated than Norton Security Standard, you might want to opt for Symantec’s Endpoint Protection 14.

Symantec’s software is used on more than 175 million endpoints around the world and takes on a variety of threats you might face, including ransomware, malware, and even zero-day exploits that promise to wreak havoc on your machines before anyone has caught up with a patch.

When targeting phishers who are trying to steal your credentials, Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 doesn’t just stop the attack. Instead, it lures the attackers into what the company calls a “decoy minefield” where they can reveal their tactics before they’re stopped. The move, according to Symantec, gives the security company important intel to be used in future threats.

Aside from that, Symantec’s Endpoint Protection 14 has a variety of other features to reduce the workload on your network and keep everything running smoothly.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 is available as a free trial. After that trial is up, you can get it for $54 per license per year. It’s ideally suited for SMBs and companies that need advanced protection to safeguard their assets.

Free Trial

Avast Business Antivirus Pro Plus

Avast Business Antivirus Pro Plus is another solution ideal for the small business that looks to the cloud and a broad network of endpoints to maximize security. In fact, according to Avast, its security intelligence is based on information it collects from 400 million endpoints.

Armed with that data, Avast’s software can be used on Macs, PCs, and servers. According to the vendor, it’s best for smaller companies that need it for four devices or less. If you need something a bit more powerful, you can opt for the company’s antivirus connected to its Cloud Management Console. That’s designed for five devices or more.

Avast’s solution is designed to protect your computer against viruses, of course, but it can also protect you with its built-in firewall. There’s also a Behavior Shield, Web Shield, and Email Shield built-in to protect you from everything from malicious programs to suspicious emails. And if Avast finds a file that looks suspicious but can’t quite figure out if it is, it will send it off to its Threat Lab to be analyzed.

One other tidbit: the software comes with a Software Defender feature for keeping your apps updated, as well as a Data Shredder to let you permanently delete files you don’t want to recover.

Avast’s Business Antivirus Pro Plus comes with a 30-day free trial. If you like it, you can keep it for $48 per device, per year.

Free Trial

If you’re looking for personal protection at the lowest cost possible, we’ve also found the best free antivirus software to help you out.

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Oct

Scientists link 3 people’s brains so they can play ‘Tetris’ together

In the future, we might be able to use brain implants like Elon Musk’s proposed Neuralink to directly connect both with other electronic devices and human beings; transmitting thoughts through a kind of high-tech telepathy. That’s still a long ways away, but researchers from the University of Washington have passed a milestone on that journey: Creating a BrainNet “social network” of minds which allows three people to send thoughts to one another’s heads. The goal? Playing a game of Tetris, obviously!

“Tetris was used as an example of a task where two humans can see the solution but are unable to act, motivating a collaboration with a third human who can act but is unable to see the solution,” Professor Rajesh Rao, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends. “Other games with a similar division of labor could also be used. A game such as Tetris provides a familiar and interesting setting for participants in brain-to-brain collaboration experiments.”

As Rao notes, for this particular demonstration, the idea was to get three people in separate rooms collaborating to play a game of telepathic Tetris. Two of the participants were able to see a screen showing the falling Tetris blocks, which may or may not need rotating in order to fit the row of blocks at the bottom of the screen. The other participant was the only person able to control the game but was unable to see what was happening on-screen. By using brain signals taken from the first two participants via an electroencephalogram (EEG), capable of reading electrical activity in the brain, they were able to trigger LED lights, telling the player what move to make.

Next to the idea of sending complex thoughts to other people, this is relatively basic research — although it lays exciting groundwork for future studies.

“Current brain-to-brain interfaces are extremely limited in the amount of information transmitted between brains, preventing practical applications,” Rao acknowledged. “However, with sufficient advances in brain recording and stimulation technologies, one could imagine networks of connected brains in the future producing innovative and creative solutions to humanity’s most important scientific and societal problems within an ethically responsible framework.”

Linxing Jiang, another researcher on the project, told us that: “We see brain-to-brain interfaces opening up futuristic ways for communication. Such interfaces could also be used by people with brain injuries who are paralyzed and unable to communicate, [since] decoding and encoding information from the brain directly might be the only way for them to communicate.”

A paper describing the research, titled “BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains,” is available to read online.

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Oct

iPhone XS and XS Max make substantial camera upgrades over the iPhone X

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

The iPhone XS and XS Max pack great cameras, but on paper they may not seem like big enough upgrades over the iPhone X. Think again. The addition of Smart HDR, paired with the powerful A12 Bionic processor, substantially improves the quality of photographs taken by Apple’s new iPhones.

We decided to pit the new iPhones against the old one in a camera shootout to highlight these improvements. We interchange the iPhone XS and XS Max, because the cameras are exactly the same.