Active Virus Defense Security Perimeters - McAfee DR SOLOMON S ANTI-VIRUS 8.5 Administrator's Manual

Active Virus Defense security perimeters

The Dr Solomon's 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: Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus
The Dr Solomon's 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 Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus
anti-virus product. Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus 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
WinGuard 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 WinGuard 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 xv