Gallery

Eats shoots and viruses

Posted on 17 Jun 2004 at 11:30

David Moss falls in love with a cute, furry animal, while Jon Honeyball gets his hands on Apple's Xserve RAID

As the staggering proliferation of viruses, trojans, spyware and phishing attacks shows no sign of slackening, it's clear that public confidence in the Internet as a medium for safe shopping and communication will quickly erode to the point where a great many companies are going to catch a serious cold. It's all very well for us professionals to know we're safe behind our firewalls, anti-virus systems, fully patched operating systems and applications, up-to-date spyware removers, ad-blockers and spam filters. The civilians who really face the problem often don't have any of the above on their home PCs, nor much real idea of how to protect themselves. The number of people who buy an anti-virus solution and then never update its signature files after they've installed it still staggers me.

Staggers, but doesn't surprise. Why the hell should they have to become computer experts just to do a spot of shopping? Why should they be forced to endure a constant stream of unwanted spam, so much of which is unmitigated filth? Families I know have simply decided that since their ISPs can't protect them from it, they're not going to put their children at risk, so they've left the Internet and won't be coming back until they can be sure it's safe to return. For the average user those solutions that companies deploy are too difficult to apply, and so far as they can see they aren't even that good anyway. Patches for everything from entire operating systems to individual device drivers are available, but if you read the weasel wording of some of the patch notes, you could be excused for not doing anything at all.

Corporations would never dream of deploying patches straight off Windows Update, for example, without parallel testing them first, but that's precisely what the civilian world is expected to do - and if something does go wrong, they're left unable in most cases even to attempt a roll-back to where they were before the patch, because they simply don't know how. In ten to 20 years' time, lack of computing knowledge may no longer be an issue, but we don't have ten years to resolve these issues - they need fixing right now. Hence I recently took a giant, and somewhat scary, step in my continuing drive to protect the networks for which I have responsibility, by deciding to try a new anti-virus vendor.

I'd become unhappy with the hoops my present system forced me to leap through to get timely updates: I wanted a system that would give me rapid updates without insisting I purchase some expensive piece of corporate/enterprise software to get them; an anti-virus solution that would let me deploy it to all the workstations without my having to go anywhere near them; and a solution that let me view each workstation and see just what anti-virus activity was happening on it. I wanted clear reporting on jobs completed, and equally clear reporting on problems encountered. I wanted a system-wide anti-virus solution that protected my email as well, and clearly showed me that my email was under protection. I wanted much more than all of the above, and I wanted it all in one package. I wanted to be able to set it up so that from insertion of the installation CD to total installation on all the workstations was a matter of a couple of hours at most, and I wanted easily accessible support.

Amazingly enough I got all of that, and the 'much more' too. My users were charmed because they like cute furry animals, and even more by the fact that since installation two months ago, we've survived some of the most intense and prolonged virus attacks in quite a while. Yes, we have a firewall; yes, we have locked-down systems; yes, we're fully patched; and now I can say yes, we have a secure anti-virus system that operates in the background without taking too many resources. Now I don't need to rush anywhere whenever a new virus hits, because I can be sure that the latest updates will already be in place, or that the current solution was strong enough to protect against the new attack anyway. I like cute, furry creatures too, but since I installed Panda Software's anti-virus system, I like them even more.