|Intro|  |News|  |Threats|  |Alerts|  |Papers|  |Events|  |Reading|  |Links|  |About Me|  |Powered-by...|
Is it a virus, doctor?
[Back to Main]

Traditionally, viruses were infections of various of type of executable files that were most often spread through the sharing of floppy disks between various workstations.  Over the years the distribution model has shifted away from floppy disks (with their obselecence) and has been replaced by e-mail as the number one attack vector for infections.  To the general public, any type of infection or mal-behaving software is a virus.  In the strictest definition, a virus is malicious code which attaches itself to another program and can only cause damage when it's host program is executed.  This is the definition we will use.

In the modern e-scape traditional viruses have been mostly replaced by self-replicating worms and blended threats.  Still, they cannot be ruled out.  There are still macro viruses being passed around for MS Word documents, and others.  There is a risk to your company's productivity from being infected by a virus, and also risk to your company's reputation should you be responsible for propagating a virus.

While the traditional approach of installing anti-virus software on each workstation worked well when infections were spread by floppy disk (they generally spread slowly and updated virus definitions were available before the damage was too great), that method alone is no longer safe.  It's much easier now to infect a large number of hosts from one carrier.  This can be accomplished well by e-mail, since many documents are shared via e-mail and that is a great way to spread macro-viruses.

In addition to having a-v software on each workstation, it's important to also have current a-v software on your e-mail server, and also your e-mail gateway, preferably from at least two different vendors.  The goal is to give yourself as much of a chance as possible to quickly receive new updates (perhaps one vendor is able to release a definition much faster than others for a particular virus) and filter at as many layers as possible to have many chances to squash the virus before it enters your network, or escapes it.




This site © copyright 2003-2011 Brian Keefer.  Unauthorized republication is forbidden.