Firms with a lax approach to security may be living on borrowed time before they are severely weakened, or worse, suffer a security body-blow. There is therefore a good business case for IT managers to spend the time and money to make sure they are fully conversant with the wide variety of security threats and that they implement good security systems. The dangers of skimping on security should be communicated at board level to ensure full management support. By now every enterprise should have installed an antivirus system, ideally one that detects emailed viruses as they arrive, removing the danger of unwise users opening infected attachments. As long as every update is implemented as soon as it is issued, most virus attacks will be blocked with minimal damage.
Most systems can update themselves automatically over the Net.
Email outsourcer MessageLabs has reported that the virus most frequently detected last year was Kakworm, though it would have had no effect if a patch to Windows available in 1999 had been applied. The fact that Kakworm was allowed to multiply suggests that a lax attitude to applying patches, and therefore to enterprise security, remains widespread. But such faith can be misplaced, a fact that is clear when we hear of leading ISPs such as UUNet collapsing for a week after a spam attack, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without email. UK startup Herculeez's MX1 product is attracting the custom of ISPs with what Herculeez calls no-fail email. MX1 would probably have prevented UUNet's discomfort.