Do you use a personal firewall ?

Another thing that struck me is the fact that a lot of worms are email borne.. and there is a good chance you may recieve an infected email before you've updated your virus defs, or before defs which deal with the new virus are out.

Its apparent that while just about all organisations have a firewall, or some form of gateway level filtering, not that many may implement virus scanning at the MTA (mail transfer agent). The gateway firewall is useless, as it comes through email, goes to the user, infects his machine, and then tries to infect the other machines on the local network.

Now if it goes and spreads via email again, then you're effectively screwed, but if email is just one of its attack vectors and it also scans the local network or installs a backdoor server, the personal firewall would issue an alert.. at least thats better than finding out a day later when the virus defs get updated and you suddenly discover the network crawling with infections.


Of course we are often defeated by that all-powerful force... the uninformed user.. who initally opened the email attachment for <insert some free screensaver name here> and will probably just click 'allow' when the firewall asks him whether to let the bug access the lan... All you can do about this is roll your eyes :roll: and rue over why you didn't take up a career in advertising/journalism/curling instead.

hehe

Sahir.

btw, curling is an absolutely inane winter olympics sport..
www.curlingbasics.com/ 8)

Curling ? Now, why would anyone want to do that?

Actually, I agree with you on the problem of the uninformed user. Earlier, I had railed on about my experiance with the company that bought my company. We had everything covered - security wise. Except we hadn't taken into account the fact that the new company didn't and sent Code Red, Code Red II and Nimbda through the VPN connection (and of course, negelected to let us know they were fighting them, before it was too late). Best laid plans.

About the email problem. We are now back to the problem of putting putting personal firewalls on all the computers - it only takes one.