Posts Tagged ‘Antivirus’
Trend Micro WFBS 6.0 SP3 Available
Friday, August 6th, 2010
Trend have quietly released Service Pack 3 for WFBS 6.0 this week. You can download it here
WFBS 6.0 Service Pack 3 includes a number of enhancements as well as bug fixes over the previous Service Pack 2. Some of those enhancements are in the installation process, others are in the product itself.
Ok- so how do I do the installation? Simple – firstly download the product from Trend Micro. Run the exe file you download and you will see this screen. It now gives you a chance of where you wish to expand the files to. You can choose this based on disk space you have in the system. Also you will note all the links there to a host of online resources and information that will help you do a better job of installing the product. The installation program then goes on to warn you that it will stop certain Trend services and also advises you to do the upgrade during periods of low system use – good advice.
About 30mins into the install it asks for the Domain admin username/password so it can upgrade the MSA on Exchange… it would be nice if this could be done right up front so we can start the process and let it just run through. It then proceeds at the end to finish the installation and then you are done. After you login to the console, you can see that you are now running WFBS 6.0 service pack 3 build 4123.
So what about the new features….
Have you ever forgottten the password to login to the Trend console? I wrote an FAQ to solve that problem, but Trend have now supplied a cool tool that will allow you to reset the Security Server password if you need to. It does require and request the credentials of the domain administrator when you run it – and that’s just for security. You can see the “Forgot your password?” section on the logon screen below.
That link redirects you to the Consol Password Reset tool on the server so you can sort it out. I understand that Trend will later release this as a separate tool for WFBS 5.0 and higher. Well done.
Ok – once you login to the WFBS Security Console, you will notice a new drop down box on the right. This box allows you to quickly jump to common settings in the Trend console. eg – if I select Edit real-time scan settings, the console then prompts with the 2nd picture below to determine which group I wish to change. This is a neat feature for sure.
Other changes in WFBS 6.0 Service Pack 3 include performance enhancements to the core engine, and better handling of things like FakeAV viruses. All these features will be incorporated into WFBS 7.0 which goes into beta shortly. If you want a complete list of the issues resolved with this Service Pack – check it out here
If you want to find out more about how to get Trend WFBS 6.0 up and running in less than an hour – check out my book here
Tags: Antivirus, Service Packs, TrendMicro
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Trend Micro WFBS 6.0 Visual Guide now available
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of my Trend Micro WFBS 6.0 Visual Guide.
This visual guide for Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security 6.0 will get you up and running in less than an hour while incorporating leading best practices to secure your network environment from malware. This guide is packed with time saving solutions, troubleshooting tips and workarounds for SBS 2003, SBS 2008, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2.
- Easily install and configure Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security
- Apply best practices for preventing malware infection into your network
- Quick tips on working around common problems
This book is available as a PDF version.
You can purchase the book from the online store – here
As an introductory offer, if you use the discount code of LAUNCH2010, you will get a discount of 10% off the normal price of the book but only if you purchase before midnight on July 18th… that’s 1 week from now.
Subscribers to our newsletter and past recipients of the Trend CSM 3.6 Guide will have already received and additional discount over and above the 10% mentioned above. See – I told you it would be worthwhile being a newsletter subscriber 
Tags: Antivirus, Books, TrendMicro
Posted in Blog, News | 4 Comments »
Tired of FAKE_AV infecting your computers?
Monday, June 21st, 2010
FAKE_AV must be one of the biggest pains and challenges of recent times in terms of malware infection. Regardless of AV vendor, I’ve heard people talk about how their computer has been infected by FAKE_AV despite having up to date Antivirus software. One of the things that helps with any problem like this is to understand the nature of the beast. Trend Micro have released a document now on how FAKE_AV works under the covers and have given me permission to distribute it to those interested. Feel free to download it from here.
Tags: Antivirus, TrendMicro
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
Problems saving Office 2007 documents?
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Have you had problems saving Office 2007 documents – particularly Excel 2007? I’ve seen this problem, and I incorrectly blamed it on my Trend Micro WFBS antivirus software, however Trend have investigated the issue and found it’s related to a bug in Microsoft Office. The issue will present itself like the screen below. You can get the fix directly from Microsoft here
You can get the fix directly from Microsoft here
Tags: Antivirus, Office 2007, Troubleshooting
Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »
Microsoft Security Essentials
Monday, December 14th, 2009
The news is all abuzz about Microsoft releasing free Antivirus software recently. Indeed they have – Microsoft Security Essentials is available free of charge. So like any good techo, I need to take a look at this. I’m evaluating this from the perspective of finding out if it could replace Trend Micro WFBS on our client sites. I uninstalled Trend Micro WFBS 6.0 from my Windows 7 laptop, rebooted and installed the new Microsoft Security Essentials product. Install was pretty straight forward – I reckon my grandmother could do it.
Naturally I skipped over the EULA like most techos and that is not good. You see according to the EULA, MSE is free for home use and home based business use. It is NOT free for business not based at home. What this means is that the majority of my clients are not permitted to use this on their work computers. Strike One for MS.
Ok – so now it’s installed my laptop, I take a look at the application itself. It looks very simple indeed. I start to dig under the covers and find it’s already setup a scheduled scan for me. Great. Looking through the console I can see this is a pretty simple product. Obviously designed for the end user in mind, and not the techo.
In all our client sites, we really love the centralised management console that we have to control the systems configuration and reporting. This to me is mandatory for any product that I’ll use in the SMB space and NOT having it means that this product is worth less to me. No central management console – Strike Two.
No after using it for a few days (I started writing this a little bit back now), I’ve found some very “interesting” features. One of them is that the laptop fails to go into suspend mode. It just freezes and locks up. Hmm – did not have a problem with this with Trend. Strike Three and you’re out.
So in brief… this is a product designed for home use, NOT for small business use at all. If you want free AV supported by a name we all know, then this is certainly something to look at.
Tags: Antivirus
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »
Trend WFBS 6.0 Service Pack 1 released
Friday, October 16th, 2009
For those running Trends Worry-Free Business Security product, they have today released Service Pack 1 for it. This service pack resolves all outstanding security bugs and fixes for performance issues that some have seen in various scenarios. I’ve beta tested this and it certainly made a positive difference to my systems. I’m downloading the final release version as we speak and will apply it to my systems to verify all is good.
You can download the Service Pack here http://www.trendmicro.com/download/product.asp?productid=39
Tags: Antivirus, Patches, TrendMicro
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
Detection vs Protection in Antivirus
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
There’s a big difference between detection and protection in the Antivirus game. There are a number of AV sites out there that measure the detection rates of the various AV packages from each vendor. Detection of a static number of virus at a given point in time is a little dangerous if you take it as your only guide to an AV products worth. The rating given to a product based on this is out of date 10minutes after the test is conducted because there are newer virus in the wild at that point. I came across this report that talks about this in a little more detail and helps to show how Trends current range of products are providing better protection to our customers. Here’s another view of the same report
Tags: Antivirus, TrendMicro
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Does anyone like Norton Antivirus?
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Yes – that’s the headline of an article I read today on Secure Computing Magazine. Like any product, they all go through their highs and lows, but I think it’s an interesting question to ask in such an open forum about ANY Antivirus product. Typical responses from people will range from the “!#$% no – it’s a piece of %^&*” though to “I love it, it’s saved my marriage, helped cure cancer and world hunger”. I’ve seen all out brawls in some of the online communities as people talk about Trend vs Symnatec vs NOD vs McAfee – often degenerating into verbal abuse rather than the technical features of the product itself. This is sad to say the least, but it happens.
Regardless of the AV product you run, each of us have our own knowledge of the in’s and out’s of it and if we have enough experience can also tune it beyond what the typical vendors support team can do. What’s your favourite AV package and more importantly why?
Tags: Antivirus, Business Focus
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »
Is memory usage on your Antivirus software high?
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
I did a full day session recently with the Brisbane SMB IT Professionals group which was a lot of fun. During that day, Radek Tkaczyk who works for VMVault a virtualisation hosting specialist company, showed me something very interesting. He has a customer (quite a few of them actually) that runs both a hosted SBS 2003 server and a hosted Terminal Server on their systems. Radek uses VMWare to host his systems and has some monitoring on each of them that I found very interesting. The graphs below show a customers systems when they switched from Symantec’s SBS Antivirus solution over to Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security 6.0 5.1. Have a very close look and you will see the massive drop in RAM, CPU and Disk utilisation that came on Jan 1 when they switch from Symantec to Trend. The 2nd drop in the RAM utilisation came when Trend released a higher efficiency engine update to their software.
Now I know we all have our favourite AV software and this post is bound to attract comments from all corners, but what I found was really illuminating is the hard facts. I’ve not yet seen any independent information like this on any given AV vendors products over such a long period of time. This type of information is what we need more and more, not just one off lab tests as many vendors use to justify their products, but solid, hard core, real world information.
Thanks Radek for the information and well done Trend Micro.
UPDATE: Radek advised that I made an error in the version number of Trend and the fact that the CPU graph is only of the SBS server, not the Terminal Server.
RAM Usage
Disk Usage
CPU Usage
This is both CPU usage on the SBS server and on the Terminal Server (separate lines for each of them)
Tags: Antivirus, SBS 2003, TrendMicro
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
What exclusions should I use for Antivirus software with SBS 2003?
Monday, July 24th, 2006
This question is asked regardless of the AV software that you use. Below I’ve compiled the standard exclusions that you should use for SBS 2003. These are the ones that we use on our clients.
Server Folder Exclusions
The exclusions listed here should be applied to your SBS server, and where applicable to other servers that host similar applications in your domain.
Exchange related Exclusions
First up you need to be aware, that the default installation of CSM for SMB v3.0 will exclude the Exchange database folders from file level scanning. Therefore I am NOT recommending including these in your exclusions. However there are some other Exchange related exclusions that you need to add to ensure that things operation smoothly.
Listed below are the items and their default locations – your installation may be different.
Exchange Server Database = C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Mdbdata (see note above)
Exchange MTA files = C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Mtadata
Exchange Message tracking log files = C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\server_name.log
Exchange SMTP Mailroot = C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Mailroot
Exchange working files = C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Mdbdata
Site Replication Service (not normally used in SBS but should be excluded anyway) = C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\srsdata
C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Conndata
IIS related Exclusions
IIS System Files = C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv
IIS Compression Folder = C:\WINDOWS\IIS Temporary Compressed Files
Domain Controller related exclusions
Active Directory database files = C:\WINDOWS\NTDS
SYSVOL C:\WINDOWS\SYSVOL
NTFRS Database Files = C:\WINDOWS\ntfrs
Windows SharePoint Services
Temporary SharePoint space = C:\windows\temp\Frontpagetempdir
Additional Exclusions
Removable Storage Database (used by SBS Backup) = C:\Windows\System32\ntmsdata
SBS POP3 connector Failed Mail = C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server\Networking\POP3\Failed Mail
SBS POP3 connector Incoming Mail = C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server\Networking\POP3\Incoming Mail
Windows Update Store = C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore
DHCP Database Store = C:\WINDOWS\system32\dhcp
WINS Database Store = C:\WINDOWS\system32\wins
Desktop Folder Exclusions
These folders need to be excluded in the desktops and notebooks clients.
Windows Update Store = C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore
If you want more information on how to configure Trend CSM Suite v3.0 for SMB on SBS 2003 then check out our subcribers section.
Tags: Antivirus, SBS 2003 Premium, SBS 2003 R2 Premium, SBS 2003 R2 Standard, SBS 2003 SP1 Premium, SBS 2003 SP1 Standard, SBS 2003 Standard
Posted in FAQs | No Comments »