Recently, at a local coffee house meeting with one of my clients, I quickly realized I was under attack. As we were going through a power point presentation, all of a sudden my HP:NTA alerted me by a simple traffic light. First going to yellow, letting me know someone was probing my machine with a message to me…..make sure your firewall is running and that your anti-virus is up-to-date. Then seconds later turning to red, letting me know that I needed to unplug immediately and to notify my security team. The alerting system gave me real time alerting capability to let me know someone was doing something they shouldn’t be.

A few things that I think are important to point out.

1. If I didn’t have NTA on my lap top I would have never known someone had launched a web browser attack on my computer.

2. More important they could have taken control of my computer without having any knowledge of the occurrence.

3. Neither my firewall nor antivirus caught the probe/attack

4. Forensics – I took the incident back to my security team and they were able to see what type of attack occurred, where did the attack originate, and etc.

5. Continues to show the importance of how layering security is vital to protecting our assets. Layering is crucial in safe computing both personally and professionally.

6. How easy NTA is to comprehend and understand what my next immediate steps needed to be.

With all that being said an incident where someone could have easily hacked into my computer was stopped by installing NTA. At $10 per license doesn’t it makes sense that everyone should have this installed on their computer?