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Re: [APD] Viruses and worms....




Some one that has the APD email address in their address book is infected with one or more viruses and/or worms. This IMHO is inexcusable. Running a computer without up to date anti-virus software is akin to sky diving without a parachute or like [snip]
and a virus scanner then please go to <http://housecall.trendmicro.com/>http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ or <http://www.ravantivirus.com/scan/>http://www.ravantivirus.com/scan/ and have your computer scanned for viruses. Once your machine is clean disconnect it from your Internet connection until you have installed a virus checker and a fire wall.

For many of the recent worms that have been going around, if you use windows, just run 'windows update' periodically (we recommend weekly to our clients) and get all the security updates -- and REBOOT when it needs to! It doesn't hurt to check Microsoft's TechNet periodically and look for any important security patches since for some reason they don't always get into the windowsupdate system (!!). Blaster explotied some RPC (Remote Procedure Call) stuff that had some holes in it, and you could have been infected even with up to the minute antivirus software. Firewalls are not effective by themselves either since many of the latest nasties come in on legitimate services like web and email, so it is very important to use all three (patches, antivirus, and firewall).


Fun Fact: Our company mail server (we are an ISP and telecom consultanting firm) bounces an email message infected with SOBIG.F every 1-3 minutes and has been for about 2 weeks now. Scary.

It's easy to keep up to date on these things now even if you don't fully understand the behind-the-scenes reasons for the problems. Lots of info is available at http://www.cert.org for the curious.

-Bill


***************************** Waveform Technology UNIX Systems Administrator

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