Scheduler recommendation/best practices

[rolltide33]

We are a school with about 900 devices(windows laptops) in the hands of mostly middle school and high school students.  The students bring the laptops home every day and use them at school every day.  Our school day runs from 8 am until 3 pm.  I am curious what everyone suggests for setting up a scanner schedule.  I do not want to cause any sluggishness during class time but I also want to eliminate potential malware problems so the students do not have to get out of class to have their computer fixed.  Most of our laptops are intel i5, 4GB+ of ram, and SSD.

 

1. Should I run a quick scan every day?
2. How often would you suggest a Full scan?
3. For the older laptops with slow spinning drives, should I setup a different policy for them?
4. Anything else I am missing or should be thinking about?

[Rsullinger]

Hey Rolltide33,

 

I wanted to give you some of the suggestions I notice our other customers use for this. Normally what our customers do is this:

 

A. Update every hour.

B. Quick scan once a day.

C. Full scan once a week. However this isn't always the case or needed. 

 

So just to answer your questions a bit:

 

1. Every day should be fine for this. As for the time, a quick scan shouldn't to much of a delay for these laptops. 

2. A full scan may not always be needed. As per our help desk article about the differnt business scans:

 

Quick Scan:

 

Quick Scans will scan the most common areas where malware is detected, including the following items:

 

Startup Objects: Executable files and/or modifications which will be initiated at computer startup.

Registry Objects: Configuration changes which may have been made to the Windows registry.

File System Objects: Files stored on your computer's local disk drives which may contain malicious programs or code snippets.

Heuristic Analysis: Analysis methods which we employ in the previously-mentioned objects — as well as in other areas — which are instrumental in detection of and protection against threats, as well as the ability to assure that the threats cannot reassemble themselves.

Full Scan:

 

Full Scans allow you to scan an entire drive using Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

 

So there is not much of a difference between the two. So it is ultimately up to you. Like I mentioned before, most of the customers I assist with have a full scan run once a week. Usually this is during the weekend.

 

3. You can make a separate policy for them and test the scan times/resource usage on them to see if a quick scan every day is too much for them. Usually this is not an issue and you will most likly be able to use the same schedule on all of your machines. 

 

4. Other then the update item I mentioned above, you should be good with that information.

 

Thank you,

 

Ron S

[rolltide33]

Thank you very much.  I am going to make the changes for quick scans to run daily and full scans to only run on the weekend.