Virus Attacks Can Enter Through Many Doors
Source: Computer World
Mention the word virus to a seasoned information security professional, and he will likely cringe and pass it off as an IT problem. Until recently, I thought the same.
I never paid too much attention to viruses. Instead, there always seemed to be some energetic young employee in the operations center or within the IT group who was the virus guru. He could rattle off the name of most viruses, put them in their respective boot sectors (or categories) and be up to date on all the popular virus protection tools. For most of these folks, virus protection has evolved into a hobby of sorts—or even an obsession.
In contrast, I've always been more interested in areas such as intrusion detection, penetration testing, firewalls, encryption, single sign-on, public-key infrastructure and so on. However, after the CIO visited my office recently to ask about the status of a virus problem, I decided to take the lead. My company has talked about enterprise virus protection, content filtering at the gateways and attachment stripping, but until now, no one has pulled the trigger. It has become painfully obvious that if someone doesn't put a foot forward, nothing will get done.
Currently, our company's only defense against viruses is antivirus software from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based McAfee.com Corp. on the desktops. We automatically push the vendor's bimonthly signature updates to each user's desktop at boot up. Unfortunately, users don't shut down their PCs each day, so it's difficult to ensure that each desktop is properly protected. We could use enterprise change-management software to automatically send the updates, but at this point we have to rely on users rebooting their machines. By encouraging employees to regularly shut down their PCs and investing in an enterprise configuration management tool, we can easily solve this problem.
