I’m doing a research paper for a class, and need to ask few questions from some of you guys or gals out in the workforce. If you could answer a few of these questions, I would greatly appreciate it.
Name: (make one up if you must)
Comany you work for (again make one up if you need to)
How has viruses affected your productivity?
Example: how has increased workload? Had to hire more help? Contemplated suicide…etc
4.Has it personally cost you anything, such as your job, time away from family. Has it cost you emotionally, mentally, physcally?
If it is known, Can you give me a number range as to how much it has cost your company to deal with these last string viruses in the past 6months.
If you email me, I’ll answer these. Won’t answer them on a public message board.
You need some more data though. In a big company a virus outbreak may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A small company may not even do that much business in a year.
Um, I have to upload the virus definitions to the network once a week…
Nope!
$0
We use Linux and other non affected OS’s on our servers. Also all our workstations are Win 98 and newer, however no-one has access in or out of our firewall, so our entire network is well protected. Were it not for the threat of personal files brought in on diskette or CD we wouldn’t even need a Virus scanner… although that would still be colossally stupid!
A very small, but successful, public records/information company
Viruses aren’t a problem here. Our servers run Linux, our desktop machines run Win98 Second Edition or Windows XP, most have anti-virus software, and I refuse to let anyone here run Outlook or Outlook Express. I make sure everyone keeps their machines updated with the latest patches from Microsoft, and I update the servers with security patches as soon as they become available. Our internal network is behind a firewall, of course.
Never had a problem, so it’s never cost me anything personally.
1: Steve
2: A big bank with stagecoaches
3: Minimal impact - perhaps get one call a month from a user asking why an inbound email item was replaced with a message saying a possible virus was found and removed.
4: No
5: Nothing extra - existing infrastructure was built with multiple layers of virus detection at gateways to outside world, email servers and client (users) PCs. All email (inbound, outbound and internal) is checked for executable attachments (.com, .exe, .vbs, etc), and all such files are stripped. Known “ports” are blocked (such as POP3) to prevent users from accessing personal email via Yahoo, AOL, etc at work and bypassing the protection created by the gateways.
Email-based viruses haven’t been an issue for us thanks to the way the systems are built. We do issue general alerts when there’s notable virus activity in the world with advice geared to helping users keep clean at home.