University IT Departments and Viruses?

buggedByViruses asks: "I work for a University IT department, which I would prefer to keep anonymous. We are in the process of making a major decision in dealing with the onset of a large amount of viruses which may or may not have the possibility of causing a lot of damage to student's and university machines. The only solution we came up with is to get the students to download and install the university site licensed copy of Norton Anti-Virus managed by a Norton server which allows us to automatically keep the students machines updated properly with the latest virus definitions and be able to perform a mass scanning for viruses if we felt the need." I am all for sane policies in keeping viruses off of campus networks, but scanning directories for infected files is no longer sufficient in catching virses, especially solutions that are known for their lack of cross platform support, and certain privacy issues as well. Norton Anti-Virus is all fine and good in a business environment where homogeny is expected, but is this expectation true of many college networks?

"[It should be noted that] the Norton server allows you to view the entire directory structure of someone's machine and allows you to see the files it is scanning as if it were your own machine. We realize this was designed more for companies and businesses, but we have found that viruses have become a major problem and give us a huge headache when we try to support all the students connected to the university network.

My question is what do other university IT departments do in response to the increase in viruses over the past 2 years. I know there are a lot of university IT employees in the Slashdot community and I look forward to getting some feedback as to how they go about doing this without causing too many privacy problems. The way we are looking at it, and we are very privacy concerned and wouldn't do anything malicious with it, is that the students are using our network under our regulations and as long as we don't use the software to 'check up on' the contents of someone's hard drive (except obviously for viruses), then what we are doing is completely legit.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated."

Comments

Anti Virus Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with the mail systems for a major ISP, and 6 months ago I installed TrendMicro's VirusWall for our Business System. I have two Compaq DL 360's running RedHat 6.2 scanning inbound and outbound emails for our largest customer, 20,000 mail accounts. And I must say it works great! Anna was stopped dead in it's tracks-- which is more than I can say for our Corporate servers, which they had to shutdown. To date, I haven't had any problems and/or issues. And I don't have any manintenane concerns at all (stopping and starting services, checking memory, high loads, and the oh so critical updating of virus patterns,etc.). Trend has solutions for Web, FTP, and Sendmail. You might want to look into it. It's one system I'm happy to SA for.

email filtering

[Wazm]

For university networks, the biggest problem are obviously pesky email viruses. The best solution I've seen is to have the university mail servers filter out all executable or .vbs email attachments. Nortan antivirus is a perk, but I don't think it should be required on everyone's system. (For obvious reasons.)