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General discussion

how to successfuly fight against viruses in a corp LAN?

Mar 2, 2005 5:29PM PST

Hi all,

i'm an assistant of an univerity computers network administrator.

In the network, we have:

-a webmail server
-a web server
-a FTP server
-an antivirus server for the workstations computers

The network is about 300 workstations computers. The workstations computers are strongly virused par viruses/worms like netsky, worm etc ... . This causes the fact that we have a lot of emails on the network, that are unuseful emails: 90% of the emails in our LAN are spams generated by the netsky, and others viruses/worms.
Do you have the same difficulties on your company/university network? What are you doing to fight against that?

Thank you.

Discussion is locked

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Pick your battles.
Mar 2, 2005 9:29PM PST

One campus disconnects any machine (via their ethernet or wifi) if said machine appears to have a virus. The students want to be on the network so they become part of the solution. Any company/campus that won't take this policy is delusional and has lost the battle. In this case you should finish your time with them and move on when the time comes.

Another fine solution to email virus issue is to implement email filters such as POPFILE which will kill off some 99 plus percent of spam and more after just a little training. Again, some will rail against such filters and again it's the dsyfunctional organization that will not implement such filters. Mostly edu groups will rail against this as "censorship" or another convenient label.

Best of luck,

Bob

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How to fight viruses on Corporate LAN
Mar 4, 2005 6:09PM PST

I think most start by hiring a more proficient Network Administrator. I'm sorry to say that it sounds like your Network Admin is in over his/her head.

But as Mr Proffitt says, installing a Spam filter on your mail server is the first step. Filter out the spam from even getting to the client machines.

Next, each computer on the network should have an Anti-virus program running on it to keep it safe. The network admin staff would be responsible for keeping the virus definitions current on all the machines. Either each machine is set to update the definitions itself, or there are tools for the Network staff to 'push' the virus definitions out to the client machine in the off-hours.