Thursday, 26 February 2015

Stories From The Front Line - Episode 1

Stories From The Front Line



We all have our share of stories to tell, and at Optima we have more than our fair share.


An Unhappy Customer

Today we had a call from an unhappy customer, let’s call this person Caller X. Caller X was very upset with Optima as we had put in a new anti-virus on their PC and now they were getting lots of popups from ESET reporting virus detected and quarantined.

A little history first. This client was a new client who had been infected and brought their laptop in for a clean-up. They were running an out of date McAfee Anti Virus product and had managed to get infected by opening an email.
We cleaned up the laptop and recommended the client install ESET Anti Virus to stay protected. Client accepted and we installed ESET Anti-Virus.

Fast forward to today.
Caller X was upset that ESET was popping up with warnings after their PC had been cleaned up. So we asked to remote into the computer to check what was going on. We soon found out what the problem was.

They were receiving a lot of emails, majority of which were spam. And many of these spam emails had attachments. Attachments which were malicious. ESET, doing what it was paid to do, was busy identifying these malicious attachments and quarantining them and alerting accordingly.

We explained to Caller X what was happening and the reason for the alerts. Caller X was still not happy. “My previous anti-virus never did that”. So we explained that was why they got infected in the first place and why we recommended ESET Nod 32. Still not happy.

Caller X said they checked their email on webmail and they had seen an email with an invoice attachment in a zip file. But they couldn’t open it via webmail as it said the attachment was not safe!  And now ESET had quarantined the attachment so they couldn’t open it in Outlook.

That’s because the attachment was infected, I said. Caller X wasn’t convinced. I proposed that we will make a change to avoid this happening. For a second, I was tempted to remove the ESET anti-virus altogether. The moment passed and I disabled the alerting feature in the ESET Nod32 program. This means they would not get alerted each time ESET removed a virus.

Caller X was informed that the problem had been rectified. And still unhappy, Caller X ended the call.

So I guess Caller X will not be using Optima again. I mean, how dare we put an anti-virus software which actually removes infected files.

Well, you can’t win them all.

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