It's a Dangerous World Out There
Let's face it; the odds are stacked against us. Sooner or later, all of our systems will be infected with a virus. As more and more companies go on-line and viruses become more sophisticated, the possibility of infection looms even larger.
Just as viruses have evolved and become more ingenious, so have the virus scanners. They must now check for boot-sector viruses, polymorphic viruses, SMEG (Simulated Metamorphic Encryption Generator) viruses, and even stealth viruses (see the sidebar "Virus Morphology,").
Viruses are part of life in this age of interconnectivity. They can be complex and deadly to your data, and they are very real. To protect your enterprise network without alienating your users--and still maintain your sanity--you need a virus scanner.
At Your Service
The first task of a virus scanner is to detect viruses. It can have the world's slickest interface and run super fast, but if it doesn't detect viruses, what good is it? To adequately test the three virus scanners I found for Windows NT, I enlisted the help of Richard Ford at the National Computer Security Association (NCSA--not to be confused with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications--see the sidebar >"The NCSA" ). Ford is the former editor of Virus Bulletin (UK) and one of the world's foremost experts on computer viruses. The virus detection tests were performed against 5383 different viruses that break down as follows:
* Zoo test set: 2638 viruses from the NCSA Virus Library
* SMEG test set: 2490 genuine replications of the SMEG virus attached to goat files (sacrificial files for the virus to attack and infect)
* Wild test set: 255 genuine infections known to inhabit computers in the real world
In addition, several polymorphic and boot-sector viruses were used. The test system was a 66-MHz Pentium, Award Modula BIOS v5.04G, with 16MB of RAM, and a 540MB Quantum SCSI disk drive powered by Windows NT Server 3.51.
The second task of a virus scanner is to help you neutralize the virus or at least notify someone that your system may be infected. And third, you need to be able to update the set of viruses that your scanner looks for, because practically as soon as you get the software, it's out of date. New viruses are created more quickly than virus scanners can keep up with them. A good rule of thumb is to update your virus software every four months. This is usually accomplished by downloading some files from the Internet, from a company BBS, or from a disk.
NT Anti-Virus 1.00 Beta 4.1
Installation
Installation was a breeze. You unzip the archive, run the setup program, and you're there. You will be prompted for the standard company information, and for a directory to install NT Anti-Virus (NTAV) in. Total installation time: 5 minutes.
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