Re: Dumb users spread viruses

["Eric A. Hall" <ehall () ehsco com>]

On 2/8/2004 4:46 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:

> In this past year's tour of my friends and family, I've taken to
> removing their antivirus software at the same time I remove their
> spyware, and I've taken to installing Mozilla (with its IMAP client) as
> a way to keep the machine from having any dependency on anti-virus
> software.

I switched to Communicator (and then Mozilla) a long time ago, and I also
use older versions of Word or alternative products that are less prone to
worms/viruses. I also run anti-virus scans on my mail server.

But I still use virus checkers locally and I don't think it's a good idea
for folks to be discounting their usefulness. There are too many other
paths for infection -- web downloads, infected CD-ROMs (yes this still
happens), and so forth. If performance is a problem then scan writes only,
instead of writes+reads (you won't get infected if you scan every write to
disk, while scanning reads is only going to produce a hit if you are
already infected).


-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/