Australian IT managers and CIOs are aware of the havoc viruses can wreak on their systems. But are organisations doing enough to protect themselves against this threat?

A number of respondents to a recent IT Manager channel poll commented that they thought IT departments could be doing more to protect their organisations against virus threats.

One Sydney-based systems engineer--who works for an Australian telcoââ,¬"commented that he had noticed security and network management/monitoring were becoming the -two ugly sisters of the IT industry".

-Everyone knows they are there, but they are generally being ignored," he asserted. -The greatest challenge that IT managers and staff have is to cost-justify a new revenue stream that security awareness and monitoring currently is."

The systems engineer thought that the main driving factor in instigating change would be legal pressures, such as threat of a lawsuit or the negative publicity resulting from exposure of confidential information.

Another IT professional pointed out that in some companies it isn't always practical to have a separate team to look after finding and eliminating viruses. -In fact, it may be difficult to convince the top management to spend money on virus protection," he said.

David Milne, IT manager at games developer Atari Melbourne House, believes that it's important to educate users to not blindly open every attachment coming in. -This is probably the most important aspect in the first 24 to 48 hours of a virus hitting the street, as it's likely your antivirus [software] will not detect it," Milne said.

Among Milne's other suggestions are; using good e-mail scanning software with automatic update facilities, warning messages for IT if an update hasn't arrived in a week, and blocking certain types of attachments. He also advises looking at e-mail conventions, for viruses that are spam-based.

He said that sometime back it had had the situation where a new employee set loose a virus in the organisation. -Fortunately we picked up on it very quicklyââ,¬"it e-mailed everyone in the company," Milne said.

According to Milne, they then disconnected from the Internet and isolated all the infected machines, unplugging either the network cable or wireless access point to these devices. -At this point, if the virus isn't being e-mailed around the company there is a good chance that you might have caught it," he said.

From there Milne, said it was then important to let all staff know that there has been a virus detected.

He also said that--depending upon the severity of the infection--you might need to shutdown or isolate the mail servers as well. Milne also said to check the e-mail server queues before connecting back to the Internet. -If there are lots of e-mails waiting to go out, there is a good chance they have a virus payload," he said.

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