The
proliferation of virus is a common headache to the computer
as well as Internet users, causing billions of dollars lost
each year. As viruses nowadays turn trickier, there is no
single cure to stop it from spreading feverishly. However,
this does not mean there is nothing that we can do to protect
our machines from being infected. The Computing Services Centre
(CSC) has implemented a series of measures to fight against
the ever-changing virus, and your cooperation will be the
key to their success.
According
to our statistics, there were about 270 incidents of localised
virus infection in 2002 despite our unceasing effort to protect
the campus machines, and in most cases an infection came from
an unsolicited mail attachment, a floppy disk or a downloaded
file from the Internet etc. In fact, most of these cases could
be prevented if enough protection had been in place or the
users had followed the protection advice. These individual
cases greatly endangered the whole network population, and
continuous education as well as blocking of infected PCs became
the only passive means to reduce the risk. The situation showed
no sign of improvement in spite of our frequent warning, but
only turned worse. In the light of it, the CSC decided to
adopt the Mcafee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), which has been
in place since January 2003, as a pro-active approach to step
up the level of virus protection. Every networked PC on campus
was required to install the ePO and this has become a policy.
PCs connected to the campus network are now installed with
the ePO agents, which automatically update new virus scan
engine and/or signature file once released. This saves a lot
of time and effort on the user end, and the protection threshold
is also significantly raised. In order to enable the ePO to
perform its function to the best, once a networked PC is found
without proper virus protection, it will be disconnected from
the campus network immediately to prevent any possible infection,
and it will be reconnected only when proper anti-virus software
is installed.
So much
for the networked PCs. You may wonder what happened to the
stand alone PCs. The CSC has repeatedly been urging their
owners to install proper anti-virus software, e.g. Mcafee
virus shield, to protect their machines on campus and other
machines, including personal notebooks using the wireless
LAN and home PCs dialing up to the campus network. Unfortunately,
there seems to be still quite a number of these machines that
are without the said or similar software in place, and they
inevitably become one of the likely sources that pose security
threat to the campus network. We therefore once again urge
the owners of these stand alone, notebook and home PCs to
have the anti-virus software set up to help safeguard the
campus network.
As a general
user, you may also help protect the CityU network by adopting
the following common and simple practice: