Viruses also cause ancillary damage by flooding e-mail systems and the associated storage systems. This additional burden can become severe enough to cause systems to stall or hang, leaving e-mail systems unusable for all traffic. Storage managers can monitor storage systems, especially e-mail, and place restrictions or alarms on the amount of growth allowed. That way, when a virus begins to spread, the storage manager is alerted and the e-mail system is less likely to be crashed due to the volume of data being generated. By throttling the data growth through quotas or other means, the system may continue to process all of the mail, including normal and virus-generated mail, keeping the system alive and buying administrators time to react to the virus itself without shutting down the clients.
Viruses cause the most significant damage by attacking stored data.
It is widely understood that the most valuable part of any system is the stored data. The 'I Love You' virus maker knew this and attacked forms of data that included stored information as well as applications and scripts. The author also chose to overwrite the data, preventing its recovery, rather than simply deleting the data. Storage managers are in the front line of defense against these types of attacks. They must ensure that all corporate data is properly backed up and can be recovered if a virus attack is successful.