Overview - F-SECURE ANTI-VIRUS FOR MICROSOFT EXCHANGE 7.10 Administrator's Manual

CHAPTER 1 15
Introduction
1.1

Overview

Malicious code, such as computer viruses, is one of the main threats for
companies today. In the past, malicious code spread mainly via disks and
the most common viruses were the ones that infected disk boot sectors.
When users began to use office applications with macro capabilities -
such as Microsoft Office - to write documents and distribute them via mail
and groupware servers, macro viruses started spreading rapidly.
After the millennium, the most common spreading mechanism has been
the e-mail. Today about 90% of viruses arrive via e-mail. E-mails provide
a very fast and efficient way for viruses to spread themselves without any
user intervention and that is why e-mail worm outbreaks, like Sober,
Netsky and Bagle, have caused a lot of damage around the world.
F-Secure Anti-Virus Mail Server and Gateway products are designed to
protect your company's mail and groupware servers and to shield the
company network from any malicious code that travels in HTTP or SMTP
traffic. In addition, they protect your company network against spam. The
protection can be implemented on the gateway level to screen all
incoming and outgoing e-mail (SMTP), web surfing (HTTP and
FTP-over-HTTP) and file transfer (FTP) traffic. Furthermore, it can be
implemented on the mail server level so that it does not only protect
inbound and outbound traffic but also internal mail traffic and public
sources, such as public folders on Microsoft Exchange servers.
Providing the protection already on the gateway level has plenty of
advantages. The protection is easy and fast to set up and install,
compared to rolling out antivirus protection on hundreds or thousands of
workstations. The protection is also invisible to the end users which
ensures that the system cannot be by-passed and makes it easy to
maintain. Of course, protecting the gateway level alone is not enough to
provide a complete antivirus solution; file server and workstation level
protection is needed, also.
Why clean 1000 workstations when you can clean one attachment at the
gateway level?