The computer people you can believe in

Without getting to technical, the typical way that a virus gets into your computer system is now via e-mail. Messages coming into the network with a file attached to them are tolerable under normal circumstances. The file attachment itself, may however contain or be a computer virus.

The traditional way of ridding the network servers and mailboxes of such viruses is to wait for the anti-virus software updates to be installed (hopefully automatically), and then trying to rid of the affected files. Regretfully, this can leave the door open for future ‘infections’ from the same virus at a later stage, although the anti virus software will almost certainly catch the files.

The anti-virus software available today normally acts on a cure type basis. Sadly, this often means that if you are unlucky enough to be among the first to be hit, you will probably waste valuable time and money fixing and putting things right.

Nearly all of the messages that could affect your system will be brought in via the Internet, so this is a good starting point for the first line of prevention. There are several products which sit between your e-mail server and the Internet Service Provider. These programs can be set to look for messages that fit certain patterns or have files with certain names. Once found, messages can be quarantined to be manually checked by IT staff.

Once you have stopped messages that could affect the system from coming in via the Internet, you can then turn your attention to the messages that are already in the mail system itself. Another range of programs can perform similar checks to all mailboxes and public folders in the e-mail system.

As soon as you hear of a new potential virus you could then take the following actions:

Shut down the Internet gateway connection to prevent anything from coming in to the system

Make the necessary changes to the ‘sentry’ software that protects the incoming mail

Re-start the Internet gateway connection to allow filtered messages to come in to the company

Run a check on the messages already in the mailboxes on your e-mail system

Make sure the latest anti-virus definition files are loaded

Update the ‘sentry’ software for later modified versions of the same virus

For more information contact www.tenfour.com, or www.c2c.co.uk

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