Locking the worms out of your network

With the Kama Sutra (among its other names) worm that is due to come out on February 3rd, I am concerned that we have taken all the necessary steps to avoid problems. What can you suggest that we look at?

With the Kama Sutra (among its other names) worm that is due to come out on February 3rd, I am concerned that we have taken all the necessary steps to avoid problems. What can you suggest that we look at?

— Via the Internet

The area that should be of most concern is user education. Unless you have an automated method in place to keep everything updated, you will need to enlist the users help in making sure that all of the Windows updates are installed on a regular basis. If you are also using the Microsoft Office Suite of applications, there are updates that need to be applied here as well. Fortunately, recent changes to the way that Microsoft’s Windows Update site works has helped streamline this process so that both Windows and Office updates are downloaded at the same time.

If you current anti-virus solution doesn’t have a central management console, I would strongly suggest that you look at moving to this kind of solution as soon as time and money permits. Although anti-virus updates should be automated at the workstation level, a central management console that alerts you to problem PCs will prove well worth the cost.

Even with a firewall protecting your network, personal firewalls for each PC may be worth considering – especially if you have workers who bring in or e-mail material from home, where the PCs may not be as well protected.

Doing periodic sweeps of the workstations for adware and spyware by using more than one tool can help eliminate points of entry to the computer caused by the present of spyware/adware. My normal tools are Spybot, Adaware, and Microsoft Anti-spyware – be sure to keep them updated as well.

All of this is just a start toward keeping your network worm free. Network security is an ongoing process – one that needs continual refinement as new threats emerge. Most of the infection problems I have seen over the past few years could have been avoided by keeping the workstations up to date in terms of patches and running some additional utilities to check for other problems before they become a problem. What you see here is admittedly workstation biased but that is where I have seen a good deal of the problems I have dealt with over the years start from.