So in the news we have the dreaded Love Bug Virus - a simple program that nearly shut the net down. Where do we go from here - At the Towers the bug hit a couple of their PC's and they were just one company in thousands to have been caught by LoveBug or its variants.

MessageLabs are well aware of the benefits of virus control. They can scan an e-mail in 1.3 seconds for all known viruses and they are set to scan over 10,000,000 a day by the end of the year.

It is their view that the security of emails are the responsibility of the ISP sending or receiving the mail and that they should send all emails via their service or similar companies offering data protection against viruses.

It is claimed that 1 in 500 emails have a virus of some description and it should be tackled at the source. A chilling 200 new viruses are released every month and UUNET was the first provider to offer the latest virus protection technology to their customers.

Now the Cirencester-based company, MessageLabs, has developed a system designed explicitly to counter the growing virus problem. Their solution is a centrally-hosted virus control facility, supported by a team of anti-virus experts, operating continuously round the clock, 365 days a year.

The process itself is simple enough. All the customer's inbound and outbound e-mails are diverted through MessageLabs' Virus Control Centre (VCC) in London. Here there are two control towers, each capable of screening five million e-mails every day, and there are already plans to add further towers as volume builds. Having made a multi-million pound investment in software and facilities, MessageLabs has complete confidence in the ability of its robust technology to deliver maximum throughput with minimum latency.

Jos White, MessageLabs' marketing director, states:
'There is no discernible impact on the speed of delivery at all,'

he asserts:
'regardless of origination or destination. Our proprietary message-routing software is very fast and very powerful. It takes on average only 1.33 seconds to process a one-megabyte e-mail under normal peak load.'

As more viruses are distributed the normal in house protection becomes out of date the moment it is installed. This is common problem with any anti-virus strategy. The ability to ensure that signatures are updated immediately before a virus has infiltrated a network is a must. The VCC automatically updates signatures, working 24 hours a day. If news breaks of a previously unknown virus, signatures are updated immediately. Not only known viruses are trapped but unknown viruses as well. They managed to detect the Love Bug and stopped 2400 emails being sent before any other company was able to detect it by convention means.

With the purpose-built facility opened officially last year, throughput at the VCC is rapidly increasing. By the end of the year MessageLabs expects to be processing 10m e-mails a day, and additional features and enhancements to the service are to follow. Meanwhile MessageLabs is also deploying its scanning technology in other key security areas such as anti-spamming, pornography filters and legal disclaimers.

BOC the giant gas company are using this ultimate virus catching system and believes it is saving their company millions each year and that about 80 suspect messages are caught in the VCC web every week.

MessageLabs claim they intercepted almost 15000 and still rising Love Bug virus (and similar strains) infected mailings. As the problem is at source of the Internet itself, then it makes sense that this is where the first line of defence should be.

BANG ON THEIR DOOR

We should all be banging on our ISP doors and insisting that they do something about it. If they shrug their shoulders and say
'What can we do about it '?

you can give them this link to read for themselves. After all they are making money out of us, we demand protection.

Are you a programmer or have a team of programmers then you should look over Microsoft's new IT support page
BOOM CONTIUES There maybe a Doom and Gloom for investing in Dot Com Companies but this could be just a temporary slump. According to OFTEL - the UK telecoms regulator - mobile phone subscribers grew by 84 per cent and internet subscribers shot up by 180 per cent in the last year. Companies are encouraged to use their conventional skills to enhance their growth and use the internet to back it up. Common sense is beginning to prevail. The view that a site should be able to make a profit before floating on the exchange, I think, should be the main criteria, as any other type of business is required to do.

Most businesses should be run in a conventional way and have internet backup... not the other way round. Then and only then will they be able to offer the service to their customers which, of late, has been reported as being very lacking in the UK. America looks after its customers and puts them first - well in most cases - its time for Britain to wake up and give the customers what they want... Good Service with Quick Technical backup.

Vegiman

15.05.00. Front Page

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