September, 2003 CCS News: Tip of the Month: How to Ward Off Worms, Viruses and Other Mischief

September, 2003

Tip of the Month: How to Ward Off Worms, Viruses and Other Mischief

At the September meeting of the Lab’s Computing and Communications Services Advisory Committee (CSAC), Mark Rosenberg of the Computing Infrastructure Technologies Group described the magnitude of recent attacks – 250,000 virus-related emails in two weeks, compared to 40,000 infected email interceptions in the past year.

In addition to explaining the difference between a worm, which is self-contained and self-propagating, and a virus, which attaches to other applications and requires the user to do something to trigger it, he also showed a slide of what users can do to protect their computers. Here are his recommendations:

Update antivirus signatures daily
Use your lbl.gov email address to ensure that all mail goes through main mail gateways
Use filters to automatically deal with viruses and spam
Don’t open enclosures that you aren’t expecting
Don’t use Microsoft Outlook as an email client
–Viruses can propagate without opening the attachment

For help with any of these items, contact the Help Desk at x4357.