Christopher J. Wolff(chris@bblabs.com)@2003.08.20 10:50:55 +0000:
What is the most common method for providing virus protection for your hosted email customers? Thank you in advance.
Making them switch to a software product that does not auto-execute arbitrary chunks of code that come in via some network connection. Ok, you got me, it is not the most common method "out there", but the most common method for my customers ;-) There's quite a lot of usable stuff out there. Many Win32 users have switched to Mozilla which seems to solve 100% of the Outlook-specific attacks which account for... hmmm... 100% of the malicious email messages of the last 6 months. Some switched to Mac. Many UNIX users are on mutt or similar MUAs which do not bear the potential for execution of arbitrary code. Sure, this does not apply for Exchange-driven installations that require Outlook, but there are also alternatives available. Deployment cost causes a certain lack of motivation to get rid of Exchange, but if you calculate a potential impact of Microsoft worms and viruses (virii?) in terms of damage to the company's data and infrastructure and also credibility, it's worth it, quite often. A bit more on the philosophical side of things, the international press and media - and many people reading or watching those media - mix up the terms "internet threat", "Microsoft-specific threat" and "Outlook-specific threat" which leads to a totally twisted perspective of the current events. Fact is, that there's a broad base of installed and Microsoft-driven PCs which are vulnerable. Customers often realize this after you explain it to them step-by-step and they seem very happy with their new knowledge about what actually caused the vulnerability of their company and information infrastructure. Some of them - call them brave - take immediate action and implement fallback or alternative solutions. Regards, /k --
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