Report: Rise in virus attacks costs firms dear

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Have to somewhat disagree based on my experience

I do agree with you that the things you mentioned can be threats but mostly in poorly managed companies and to home users. However, I think that you are dwelling too much on old threats and not focusing on current threats.

Phishing attempts and virus/trojan emails are stopped by mail filtering software at the server side. They never get through to that gulliable sales director. Likewise, HTTP potential threats such as personal web email sites, P2P sharing, and other known trouble areas are either blocked or are severely limited. Our screening software stops the IE and Outlook vulnerabilities mentioned in your article. Firewall screens do prevent problems, even if they're encrypted. How? By proactively preventing such questionable traffic from getting by from any unknown site or from any email sender instead of reactively waiting on an AV update.

Requiring personal responsibility by employees for their Internet activities on the job has also helped. They think twice about clicking that odd attachment or downloading britneynekkid.exe if their job is on the line. Another example is our bonus in IS requires that we don't have downtime incidents. This insures that we take the proper steps to prevent attacks (MSBlast did cost us our bonus last year though).

There are two main threats I see to the well managed corporate Windows environment. One is something like MSBlast that takes advantage of a rather obscure hole in the Windows networking structure. This is perhaps the most serious threat . The second are laptops that go in and out of the controlled environment. While employee responsibility helps here, it isn't foolproof and something could sneak in through that route, such as a browser hijacker.

Posted by: jfrankcarr   Posted on: 03/20/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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