As malware becomes more varied, you'll need to employ multiple strategies to protect your network against insidious, treacherous code. In this article, you'll learn about the threats posed by malicious code, both conventional malware and mobile code. You'll look at the issues surrounding various scripting languages, ActiveX, HTML in e-mail, viruses, worms, Trojan Horses, and open file shares. Most important, you'll find out how to protect your network from these threats. A Virtual Epidemic Just about any code that can run on a PC is capable of malicious action.
Viruses are by far the most widespread problem.
I'll refer here to both viruses and worms as viruses, as many recent malware examples have characteristics of both. Network Associates estimates that the number of known viruses and worms reached more than 54,000 by January 2001. Of these, researchers report that users encounter several hundred viruses each month. These viruses are cataloged on the WildList , a listing of viruses that have appeared in the wild, as opposed to in the laboratories of anti-virus software developers. The number of different viruses in the wild isn't as important as how common they are.