In order to detect and eliminate new viruses, antivirus solutions usually take a reactive approach: they wait for it to appear, infecting its first computers and then they are updated to combat it as soon as possible.  Until now, antivirus protection responded quickly enough to head off new viruses before they could spread widely. For example, Panda's antivirus solutions are updated automatically via the Internet, at least once a day.  However, new viruses and intruders have recently emerged with the capacity to infect thousands of computers in a few hours, before antivirus protection can be updated to combat them. Sasser, Netsky, Mydoom or Sobig are good examples of these new generation viruses, which use new means of propagation and exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems and the most widely used software.

Dedicated Perimeter Protection Strategy

Contributed by Panda Software (USA), Inc.

Latest data indicates that one in every 204 e-mail messages contains a virus, and that 99 percent of viruses enter companies via SMTP mail or HTTP web-browsing. And its not just viruses that cause problems. In January 2003, the SQL Slammer worm hit thousands of servers around the world, exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability and causing denial of services in SQL servers which resulted in losses estimated, according to Computer Economics, at 705 million euros. What’s more, employee productivity is being increasingly degraded not only due to the time they spend classifying and eliminating the large number of spam messages that reach their inboxes, but also due to the time they spend accessing inappropriate or unauthorized web content, which, if distributed, can damage the corporate image.