Swat Those Bugs Away

Would you want to see a virus crawl into your PC from a message? Of course not, and neither do your users.

Unfortunately, many corporate customers shrug their shoulders at labor hours lost because of a viral infection. That should not continue. The International Computer Security Association says 87 percent of virus infections occur via e-mail attachments, a jump from 56 percent in 1999 and 32 percent in 1998. Because e-mail has widely replaced the floppy disk as a fast way for sharing files, thats hardly surprising.

One thing you can do to try to stop worms and their ilk in their tracks is wean users away from Microsoft Outlook. That may sound like a drastic step, but the arrival of Outlook transmitted diseases like Melissa and ILOVEYOU are cause for concern. Microsoft may beg to differ, but using Outlook for reliable e-mail is like relying on the Titanic for reliable transportation.

Your main job, however, is to make sure that no viruses ever arrive in anyones mailbox in the first place. To stop viruses at the server levels, the leading products are Trend Micros InterScan VirusWall and ScanMail and GFis Mail Essentials for Exchange/SMTP for Exchange and Notes servers.