VirusWall comes to the rescue
Connecting state and local government leaders
When Meat Grinder came to town, Tim Crosier was ready for the bout. Meat Grinder isn't the name of a professional wrestler. It's a highly infectious macro virus that does minor damage to systems after entering through mailed attachments to Microsoft Word documents. Meat Grinder started showing up at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Port Hueneme, Calif., in early 1997.
When Meat Grinder came to town, Tim Crosier was ready for the bout.
Meat Grinder isn't the name of a professional wrestler. It's a highly infectious macro
virus that does minor damage to systems after entering through mailed attachments to
Microsoft Word documents. Meat Grinder started showing up at the Naval Surface Warfare
Center in Port Hueneme, Calif., in early 1997.
Crosier, an electrical engineer at the center, said Trend Micro Inc.'s VirusWall
protected the e-mail gateway running under Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0. Trend Micro's
ScanMail for Lotus Development Corp.'s cc:Mail 8.0 also was on guard to protect Navy
users' desktops, but Crosier said Meat Grinder got stopped at the mail gateway.
"We haven't had an e-mail virus in a year" on his workgroup's 250 desktop
systems, Crosier said.
He said Trend Micro of Cupertino, Calif., has given good support and has "fixed
problems we pointed out in a reasonable time, usually within three or four months."
ScanMail did have problems when two workgroups' post offices weren't synchronized. It
could log into only one post office, he said. Trend Micro fixed that problem, as well as
ScanMail's inability to detect successive users logging in and out of a desktop.
Crosier said he wants to install an anti-virus product on the servers of his Novell
InternetWare 4.1 network so he won't have to configure the desktops with a scanning
product. His workgroup has a mixture of Pentium, Pentium Pro, 486 and Apple Macintosh
systems.
One problem with ScanMail, he said, is that it works with cc:Mail 8.0's database but
not with the client itself.
The command uses Dr. Solomon's Software Inc.'s Desktop 7.74 product to protect against
viruses arriving on diskettes.
"The user interface needs some work," Crosier said, because the product must
be reinstalled with each anti-virus release, unlike competing products that let users
download upgraded signature files from vendors' World Wide Web sites.
About two years ago, Crosier bought 200 ScanMail licenses from Trend Micro through an
IMPAC credit card purchase for less than $2,500. In early 1997, he paid $50,000 for a
six-year site license from Dr. Solomon's of Burlington, Mass., to cover 2,500 users and
500 servers.
Contact Trend Micro at 408-257-1500.
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