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August 29, 2003
Security through more centralization?
Salt Lake Tribune had an article from the Washington Post about the future direction of virus defenses.
Troy Jessup, our resident Security Analyst, has written some about this recently, as have I. We've talked at length about how to resolve this situation. This article gives one option: let better, faster, smarter people take care of it for us.
The latest SoBig virus showed how vulnerable the distributed anti-virus method is. Even in cases where a competent I.T. professional is managing the email system, the SoBig virus got through to infect whole organizations before the system-wide anti-virus was updated.
I don't think that consolidated email virus filtering is the solution, but it may be a big part of the solution. I'm sure that service providers will have an increase in customers who purchase virus-filtered email now, and organizations will look for better, faster, more reliable ways to filter virii from their email systems.
None of these really focus on the most important part of this problem: users who open executable attachments. Maybe it's just unreasonable to expect that users can be educated on such a complex issue. But users have to be involved, educated, and made more responsible for their activity on the Internet.
Microsoft, too.
Posted by pete at August 29, 2003 2:46 PM