In the past two years, this has become the biggest outside threat to businesses hooked up to the Internet. Unfortunately, because of the minimal security installed on network software, it has come under increased virus attacks. During the Nimda/Code Red attacks we were out servicing several clients daily. One of our association clients had 12,000 viruses alone on their server. One of the local county governments shut down their entire computer network for three days to fix the problem

Microsoft released the security patches and we fixed dozens of servers but it made everyone painfully aware how vulnerable servers were to viruses. The rule of thumb before Nimda was that all one had to do was avoid opening suspicious looking attachments to be safe. Now it was possible to just visit a website with Internet Explorer and infect the server. Nimda spread by masquerading as an embedded wav file in a web page. It came into your PC then traveled to the server via the mapped shared drive, then infected the Internet Information Services. Left alone, it would just keep replicating until it choked all network traffic.

Datamax offers a wealth of experience with anti-virus solutions. We offer Norton AV, McAffee and Norman solutions. We are big believers in the Norton Enterprise anti-virus solution, that covers servers, workstations and email. Most importantly, it offer centralized management for the entire network. No more running around to see if all the PCs have the latest anti-virus updates because here the server updates all the networked PCs. Also, one can examine a virus infection history over the network and find out if this staffer or that one is more susceptible to bringing in viruses to the network. Norton anti-virus for Exchange mail servers intercepts viruses before they even reach the desktop.

We also offer other email protection services. We can install Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook lockdown tool that will prevent users from categorically receiving certain types of attachments. We also offer a content filter tool that will automatically block email with certain offense words either in the subject line or the text body.