• Prevention
• Education
• Antivirus software
• Server side protection
• Bad news!

Virus Prevention is a mindset and the most important thing you can do. You can't 100% prevent virii from entering your machine! You can take steps to block most virus from entering. If you are a Windoz user and you don't have 'automatic updates' enabled, make sure that you check the Windows Update site multiple times a week. Most virii today are eMail borne and wait for you to do something without thinking. Do not 'turn your antivirus software' off, and make sure that you keep current with updates. Virii are created on a daily basis and are released into the world. Updating your software is the second most important step that you can do.

Education is a must! One of the absolutely best things that you can do is to educate you and/or your users. Following a couple of simple rules you can prevent 80% of virus problems! Pay attention:

• If you don't know the sender AND the subject doesn't pertain to what you do -> DELETE IT. Don't even bother with it. Get rid of it! Trash it! Get the idea?
  
  
• If you know the sender AND it has an attachment AND the sender didn't tell you about the attachment; be very careful. If you use Outlook Express, you can view the eMail source -> right click on message in the in-box, select properties, then details, then view source. This shows you a 'text' view of the message and you can scroll around checking stuff out. You will be looking for the attachment, and it should appear something like:

                    
                      
  
                        
  --1363154104-1513017285-1089849709=:14803
                        
  Content-Type: APPLICATION/x-tar; name="checkmail.tar"
                        
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: BASE64
                        
  Content-ID: 
                        
  Content-Description: 
                        
  Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="checkmail.tar"
                      
                    
                  

  This attachment is one that happened to exist on my eMail client and in this case is harmless. You probably will see different stuff. Note that other eMail clients have ways to 'view the source' and you should find out and get used to the how to do it part!

  What you need to note is that doing stuff this way, windows does not hide known file extensions. For instance, if your Windoz is hiding extensions, you would not see the whole filename with extension -> you would see BadApplication.doc instead of BadApplication.doc.pif  Most virus are links to other sites which run ( or launch ) an application on your machine doing whatever downright devious things script-kiddies and hackers can think up.
  
  

• Disable your preview pane. In Outlook Express, click Tools, Layout, then disable the preview pane. Picture directions here! If you have multiple eMails in your in-box and have a preview pane open, the eMails are 'previewed' *BEFORE*. If you think that you're "just deleting them" think again, they still show in the preview pane and are opened. If you have a eMail borne virus ( not an attachment ) when that email opens, guess what? Congrats! You have whatever virus it is/was!

Antivirus Software is made by many and it has been our experience that the big three all have some sort of issue with applications. Well, you need to take the lessor of evils and have ONE of them anyway. We use PCCillin from Trend Micro and have found that it works better than the other two ( Mcafee and Norton ). In fact, PCC has found virii on machines that both of the others were supposedly guarding! Note that you also can select the 'free virus scan' and have your machine checked using the Internet.

Server side protection is one of the ways we fight virii. We haven't seen reliable multiple antivirus setup's on any Windoz box, so having it done first at the mail server is a plus! Antivirus on the MTA is your first line of defense. Scans look for specific patterns and unwanted files. Even though we catch *lots* of virii, We still recommend that you have some sort of additional antivirus on your local network machines as we can not control where your users surf and what ever trouble they get from possible rogue sites. Lets not even think about web-based email clients ( Hotmail, AOL, yahoo, MSN...etc ) and what can come into your network as users click on links. Our antispam setup on the mail server scans incoming customer mail too, and you can read more about it above.