Network Velocity » AntiVirus

Conficker Virus Update

Stuart — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:24 +0000

We blogged about the Conficker Virus back in October of 2008 and then again in March of 2009.

It was feared that Conficker was programmed to become active on April 1st, potentially causing problems across millions of PC’s. While this date passed with no noticeable impact, many sites across the web are reporting that Conficker is still a threat and in many cases causing problems. Yahoo reports that Conficker is being used to install additional software, hijacking PC’s to send out SPAM email. ZDNet reports Conficker installs malware that masquerades as AntiVirus Software.

Network Velocity has many strategies to protect client systems from these threats. For more information please contact us.

April Fool’s Day poses Virus risk

Stuart — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:16:07 +0000

Virus programmers have written a new virus that is scheduled to become active on April 1st, 2009. It is estimated that 9 to 15 million machines are currently infected. On April 1st, these machines will execute the malicious code, potentially causing havoc across homes and businesses.

We wrote about this vulnerability back in October of 2008. We rolled out proactive patches to all clients at that time.

Viruses tend to mutate quickly. Even with current virus protection, it’s advisable to always be wary of what files, links or videos you may receive. For viruses, the best defense is common sense. Even though our clients are patched, do not open any attachments you do not expect to receive, even if they are from a trusted source.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us.

What SPAM looks like

Stuart — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:59:25 +0000

Network Velocity provides Postini Email Protection Services to our clients. On a typical day we’ll process over 32,000 emails. Of those 32,000 emails only 5,000 will be delivered. That’s a delivery ratio of 15%.

We describe SPAM as a cat and mouse game. Postini has built the best mousetrap available, but the mice (SPAMMERS) are always fighting back. To share what we see from our console we’ve included a few screenshots of the email traffic we process. This sample was taken in the evening (between 8-9PM) so traffic is not as high as it would be during business hours.

In addition to best-in-class Email filtering Postini also provides up to the minute AntiVirus scanning of all email traffic.

Chart of email traffic for 60 minutes. The blue line represents mail that was actually delivered.

Pie chart of email for past 60 minutes. 18% of email was delivered for this one hour timeframe. At peak times the ratio of delivered email will be as low as 7%.

Raw statistics for 60 second interval. 882 messages processed, or ~15 per second!