Rodent Regatta

The request for a ”bill of materials” that insulates small networks and individual PC’s from spam, viruses, hacking and pop-ups went nowhere. Surely there is a set of hardware and software that can be implemented on typical small business networks – yes, they’re ”typically” Microsoft-based.

In my office we keep all PC’s up-to-date with the latest Windows updates. We have copies of Norton Antivirus running on all the PC’s and we keep it updated. I’m using Office 2003 in a pre-release version to try and battle spam. Installing Google’s new Toolbar 2.0 solved the pop-up problem. All of this sits behind a router with a solid firewall. We don’t run Microsoft Exchange.

Even with this installation, Norton alerted me each time one of the infected sobig emails hit the inbox. I wasn’t infected, but I was interrupted by the alerts. It sounds as if Steven was even spared that inconvenience!