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Issue
33 - September 2002
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Security
Management on Virus Protection
By
Peter Mok
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The
anti-virus software (Mcafee) has been made available centrally
for every PC on staff LAN. Users are regularly informed to
update their anti-virus signature file (a file used by anti-virus
software to detect the presence of any known viruses). However,
for some reasons, almost everyday some staff PCs are still
found to have contracted viruses.
We believe
the ever-presence of virus infection in some staff PC, is
due to the following:
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The
anti-virus software is not installed when the system is
installed or re-installed.
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The
virus signature file is not kept up-to-date even when the
staff are so informed.
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The
PC are not re-booted daily. As a result, the daily process
of updating virus signature file to be carried out automatically
at login time fails to execute.
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The
process of updating virus signature file is intentionally
or un-intentionally blocked by the personal firewall being
locally installed on some staff PCs.
To ensure
that our users will deploy the anti-virus software and keep
the virus signature file up-to-date, we are planning to install
the Mcafee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) on every PC on the Staff
LAN starting this September. This ePO is a network anti-virus
policy management program which can prevent a network infrastructure
from contracting or spreading viruses by managing and enforcing
the following policies from an anti-virus administrator server:
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Push
anti-virus software to client PCs
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Download
and distribute virus signature file to client PCs
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Schedule
and manage virus scan on client PCs when required
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View
and report network-wide anti-virus activities and the status
of client PCs' virus protection
Each PC
with an ePO agent installed will automatically keep its scan
engine and/or virus signature file up-to-date, unless the
ePO's agent has been removed or its download or update function
is blocked by personal firewall (hence disabling its automatic
update of virus signature file). However, the implementation
of ePO can only minimise but not eliminate completely the
existing problems we face. We still have to rely heavily on
users' cooperation and commitment to make their as well as
others' PCs virus free.
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