mtg followup

Fri Nov 18 18:00:51 PST 2005

> and how many laptops have been blessed/issued by the company,
> gets plugged in at home, picks up a virus at home, and
> brought into work and spread out thru the company ??
> 	- very very common problem and occurs fairly often

In two years of laptop deployment at my previous company this has not 
occured.

We followed a simple policy :

All laptops pass through the hands of IT before they hit the company
network in any way.

All laptops were setup with appropriate anti virus and anti spyware and 
windows update configs.

We used eset technologies nod32 for antivirus on the desktop and the 
mailserver. It seemed to do the job just fine.

We received many viruses every day from the outside world, nothing seemed 
to get through to infest us.

We committed to a one day turnaround on laptops that reached us, this 
allowed the users ot have faith in the process and not be impacted in 
their daily work.

So yes, its a risk management question, but that particularly problem 
isn't too difficult to solve.

At the company before that we used an active defense mechanism with IDS 
sensors deployed across the network and switch ports being shut down 
quickly once malicious signatures were noted.

Fundamentally, you have to care about fixing the problem and keeping the 
users working as well :) But the problems are for the most part a solved 
issue I think.

Cheers,

Al