This tip comes from reader Tony Gore who works at Aspen Enterprises in the UK:
NETGEAR make a range of devices for keeping malware out of your environment, with the UTM5 being the smallest and cheapest. Without subscriptions it is around $250 and the subscriptions are about $120 per year. There are three subscriptions available -- the AV, antispam and URL. The URL blocking is impressive -- sometimes a few pages browsing Google can result in a few hundred blocked URLs. It is pretty good at protecting you from drive-by downloads:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1362390163142
As an aside, there is no "per user" licensing of the protection, so for low use, large user networks it can be very cost effective. It is also a decent idea for cheap and easy protection of a "guest" network.
For personal use, Sophos have a free UTM software to put on an old PC:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1362390167736
The above tip was previously published in an issue of WServerNews, a weekly newsletter from TechGenix that focuses on the administration, management and security of the Windows Server platform in particular and cloud solutions in general. Subscribe to WServerNews today by going to http://www.wservernews.com/subscribe.htm and join almost 100,000 other IT professionals around the world who read our newsletter!
Mitch Tulloch is an eleven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and a widely recognized expert on Windows Server and cloud computing technologies. Mitch is also Senior Editor of WServerNews. For more information about him see http://www.mtit.com.