If your firewall av protection keeps the virus getting in through normal mail operations that's fine, but there are many other ways for it to get in.
If your company is like mine many remote users will connect in with their remote PCs, and do so without updating their virus definitions. They Also connect in with their home PCs over a VPN, which I believe would bypass the firewall, since the info is encrypted. Also doing an exmerge on the server will work, but you have to take the server down to do it, plus clean the various connector queues. Trust me if you have to do this everytime a new virus comes out you will look pretty silly, and the upper management types will start asking why your are spending money on AV software if it doesn't work. My parent company has had just about every AV product on their exchange servers, McAfee, NAV, F-secure, and Trend, and have reported no stability problems with any of them. Bottom line get something on the Exchange server. I would recommend Trend, if you have any X.400 connectors as it has been the only one to block all viruses coming over the x.400 connector from out parent company, and our other worldwide distributors. Also the company we rent space to has trend, and never got "I Love you", Anna Kornacova, Naked Wife or any of the other recent viruses, and we got them all with McAfee. I would definitely recommend against McAfee. Never worked as advertised. John Majetic Radiometer America -----Original Message----- From: Steven Peck DNET [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 1:36 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Is virus protection on the Exchange server necessary? No anti-virus on Exchange? Ick. Years ago, during the 'Iloveyou' virus, we had .vbs attachment blocking on the Exchange gateway. We also had McAffee on the server(so it was fairly useless anyway). On to the story. We weathered the first few hours of the global outbreak just fine, THEN, one of the developers who was downloading his Hotmail account into his Outlook through POP3 'opened' an attachment from the CEO of a client. BAM, our poor server was infected. (No, I do not know why he would think that the CEO of a client company would send him a message that said he loved you, we did ask him and he was unable to answer <shrug>). This doesn't even account for the few folks who bring in files from home on floppies or CD's. I would not run without anti-virus on the Exchange server. Even one I consider as slow as McAfee. McAfee's main problem seems to be that it cannot keep up with an infection once it starts replicating. Of course, we disabled POP and IMAP through the firewall and discovered that the developers thought the INCONVIENIENCE of renaming vbs and js files to txt tooo onerous so they had done an end run with the hotmail accounts. Needless to say, a number of attachments became imposible to mail internally as well, and several people had to explain to managers WHY they had bypassed normal proceedures which cost the company money in downtime, etc, etc. There are a number of entry points for virii, so you jut kind of have to go with a layered defense and protect everything as well as posible. Hope this helps. -sp -----Original Message----- From: Lathrum Matt-P55173 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 10:10 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Is virus protection on the Exchange server necessary? Our environment has Trend running on the firewall for anti-virus and content filtering. We have NAV running on the desktops. We are currently evaluating Antigen and SAVF (Symantec) to put on our E2K Exchange servers (including an E2K cluster on a Compaq SAN). However, our Microsoft resident is suggesting to us that AV on the servers themselves is not necessary and will only introduce problems and instability (particularly Symantec's product). He said that when a virus outbreak occurs that actually gets inside, a quick ExMerge on the server is just as effective as pushing out virus defs using the AV product. With AV software on the firewall and on the desktops, what do people think about not putting AV on the Exchange servers themselves? -- Matt Lathrum General Dynamics Decision Systems When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl. List Charter and FAQ at: http://www.sunbelt-software.com/exchange_list_charter.htm List Charter and FAQ at: http://www.sunbelt-software.com/exchange_list_charter.htm List Charter and FAQ at: http://www.sunbelt-software.com/exchange_list_charter.htm
