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The Safety Column
An Ounce of Prevention
The "Alerts" section on the UIS home page, the section that used to carry a new virus warning every few weeks, is gone. UIS hasn't distributed a campuswide virus warning in months. You probably haven't seen a UIS technician around your office cleaning viruses from the computers, either.
Signs of virus infection are missing because the most common viruses—those distributed by e-mail—are no longer reaching us. Since March 9, all executable e-mail attachments (those that contain full-fledged program when opened) have been blocked from GUMail accounts.
This decision was prompted by an alarming increase in worldwide virus traffic at the beginning of the year. As explained on the Automatic Attachment Filtering Web page, which was posted when the filter was implemented, "The number of viruses hitting the Georgetown e-mail system has recently skyrocketed. This dramatic increase clogs the mail system, fills mailboxes with large, virus-infected attachments, and creates a greater risk of virus infection on campus." More than 300,000 attachments were blocked by the filter in one month; at least 78% of those were viruses.
When an attachment is removed, the following notification is placed on the e-mail:
WARNING: This e-mail contained one or more attachments that have been identified as possibly carrying a virus. For more information, contact help@georgetown.edu or visit the following Web site: http://uis.georgetown.edu/email/
managingaccounts/attachment.scanning.html
An attachment named posed a security hazard and was removed from this document.
The Automatic Attachment Filtering Web page is referenced in the notification to provide information about e-mail filtering and also because harmless attachments are sometimes blocked by the filter. A common way to send a group of files through e-mail is to compress them into one Zip (.zip) file. Unfortunately, Zip files are also a common way to transmit viruses. Most of the recent e-mail virus threats faced by Georgetown, such as Beagle, Netsky, and Novarg, are transmitted in Zip files. Viruses generated at least 82% of the Zip files sent to GUMail addresses in one month alone.
You can send a legitimate executable file through the GUMail system by changing your file’s extension name, allowing it to escape the filter. Directions are found on the Automatic Attachment Filtering Web page. Though filtering will protect your computer from viruses that send themselves to your GUMail account, other viruses that can still invade your computer. Those who check non-GUMail accounts at work can still be infected by e-mail viruses. Network-transmitted viruses, like Blaster, can invade computers that do not have the appropriate Windows security patch.
Set up automatic Windows updates to keep your security settings current, continue to run Symantec Anti-Virus with daily LiveUpdates and weekly virus scans, and follow the rest of the guidelines on the How to Protect Your Computer Web page. When combined with e-mail filtering, these guidelines give us a comprehensive strategy for fighting viruses on all fronts. | 
