Daily Safety Check Home Edition

By Neil J. Rubenking

Your work computer almost certainly has antivirus protection installed, but it's not something you have to worry about. The IT department manages scheduling scans, keeping it up to date, and dealing with any problems. For $69 per year, Daily Safety Check Home Edition brings that same kind of managed care to your home computer. For $199 per year you can protect all the PCs in your household (up to ten).

Daily Safety Check installs its own managed antivirus, a modified version of GFI VIPRE Antivirus 2012, but the service does more than just manage antivirus protection. It checks for security updates to Windows and 20-odd high-risk programs, automatically pushing patches to your system if necessary. It watches for hack attacks, both blocking them and sending you an email alert. And it keeps track of your hard drive's health, alerting you if the drive shows signs of going bad.

At your request, Daily Safety Check will install Family Shield, a simple DNS-based content filter from OpenDNS. Family Shield blocks access to adult websites as well as known phishing and malicious sites. Managed online backup is available at a separate fee of $70 per year per five gigabytes.

The Daily Safety Check Experience
The first thing you'll notice after installing Daily Safety Check is...nothing! At the end of the installation it simply opens a Web page explaining that you need to leave the computer running for the next 24 hours to allow the service to complete its initial system check. You'll also get an email message confirming that the installation was successful.

After a little while you may notice a new icon in the system tray. The icon for the managed antivirus is grey to start, blue after it has completed the necessary initial update, and green while it's scanning. You can open it up for a look if you wish, even launch a scan yourself. But you're not required to touch it, ever.

If Daily Safety Check detects missing security patches, it will send an email notification and push those patches to the system a few hours later. During the process of installing the managed antivirus and installing patches, the system will need to be rebooted. You'll get an email notification about that as well, giving you a few hours to finish what you're doing. If you don't reboot the system yourself, Daily Safety Check will eventually do it after a five minute countdown warning.

You may get an email alert stating that the service has detected a security threat. The message makes one thing very clear?you don't have to do anything about it. Agents at the company's Security Operations Center will take care of the problem. If necessary, and with your permission, they'll push a remote-control application to the affected system and manually take over remediating the problem.

When the system is all cleaned up, or when Daily Safety Check has confirmed there's no security problem, you'll get an email notification. A daily security report summarizes the status of all your covered PCs, and a weekly report summarizes the daily reports.

You can also log in to the company's website and view your support tickets there, or open a new ticket yourself. Daily Safety Check agents encourage users to open a ticket if they think there's any kind of security problem on the computer.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/e6jv5z-fzoQ/0,2817,2408679,00.asp

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