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Re: [LUG] Sharp business practice in North Devon



Paul Weaver wrote:
> 
> I do think its pathetic. If buisnesses are seriously worried about email
> viruses, then they deserve to get them IMO. A decent security policy and they
> should be fine.

Much as I sympathise with the view, I've been to companies with
reasonably clued (But not IT literate) employees who needed some help to
upgrade their virus checkers let alone handle a virus incident properly.

Indeed even up to date virus checkers can at best save the second person
exposed to a new virus.

It is all to easy to forget how much the average IT literate person
takes for granted, that the average man in the street either doesn't, or
doesn't want to, know.

Small companies often can't afford 3rd party IT expertise to the level
that would protect them properly against this kind of malicious
activity. Large companies often don't enforce policies uniformly if at
all.

Remember the Pentagon got hit by the Windows Scripting e-mail
attachments. Must have been a downer for the spies who were sending them
Windows Scripting trojans to steal all their "Recent Documents".

Now hands up all those still running a known rootable xntpd daemon... I
was running "restrict 0.0.0.0 ignore" in my ntp.conf anyway, but I don't
think this is enough having read the exploit code.

	Simon

PS: I can't think of a decent security policy for e-mail viruses that
doesn't start with uninstall Outlook Express, except perhaps the ones
that start "Install Linux". The one person here who uses OE, has
abandoned it as it shows all her mail as being corrupted, despite the
fact that other IMAP clients work fine....

-- 
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