Active Virus Defense Security Perimeters - McAfee VIRUSSCAN 4.5 Administrator's Manual

Active Virus Defense security perimeters

The McAfee Active Virus Defense product suite exists for one simple reason:
there is no such thing as too much anti-virus protection for the modern,
automated enterprise. Although at first glance it might seem needlessly
redundant to protect all of your desktop computers, file and network servers,
gateways, e-mail servers and firewalls, each of these network nodes serves a
different function in your network, and has different duties. An anti-virus
scanner designed to keep a production workstation virus-free, for example,
can't intercept viruses that flood e-mail servers and effectively deny their
services. Nor would you want to make a file server responsible for
continuously scanning its client workstations—the cost in network bandwidth
would be too high.
More to the point, each node's specialized functions mean that viruses infect
them in different ways that, in turn, call for optimized anti-virus solutions.
Viruses and other malicious code can enter your network from a variety of
sources—floppy disks and CD-ROMs, e-mail attachments, downloaded files,
and Internet sites, for example. These unpredictable points of entry mean that
infecting agents can slip through the chinks in incomplete anti-virus armor.
Desktop workstations, for example, can spread viruses by any of a variety of
means—via floppy disks, by downloading them from the Internet, by
mapping server shares or other workstations' hard disks. E-mail servers, by
contrast, rarely use floppy disks and tend not to use mapped drives—the
Melissa virus showed, however, that they are quite vulnerable to e-mail–borne
infections, even if they don't execute the virus code themselves.
At the desktop: VirusScan software
The McAfee Active Virus Defense product suite matches each point of
vulnerability with a specialized, and optimized, anti-virus application. At the
desktop level, the cornerstone of the suite is the VirusScan anti-virus product.
VirusScan software protects some of your most vulnerable virus entry points
with an interlocking set of scanners, utilities, and support files that allow it to
cover:
• Local hard disks, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other removable media. The
VShield scanner resides in memory, waiting for local file access of any sort.
As soon as one of your network users opens, runs, copies, saves, renames,
or sets attributes for any file on their system—even from mapped network
drives—the VShield scanner examines it for infections.
You can supplement this continuous protection with scan operations you
configure and schedule for your own needs. Comprehensive security
options let you protect individual options with a password, or run the
entire application in secure mode to lock out all unauthorized access.
Preface
Administrator's Guide xi