Antivirus Taskforce

Background:

The Internet has brought us unparalleled increases in speed of communication.  In a single click, you can send the latest draft of your dissertation to your professor in Zimbabwe.  It will be there in seconds.  Unfortunately, with this ease of communication come some unforeseen risks.  Unscrupulous hackers in the computing community have coded malicious, self-replicating and disseminating programs which can invade your system, steal or destroy your data, launch anonymous attacks on remote systems, or crash you computer.  To combat these "viruses", a market has grown up around "antivirus software": applications designed to detect and eliminate malicious virus programs.

At UVM, we have licensed McAfee VirusScan for all computers on our campus (currently in version 4.5sp1).  McAfee has served us well in the past, but shortcomings in its design have led us to question whether it will always be the best choice for our campus.  To be specific, the McAfee product we use offers poor central management and monitoring features and often causes reduced system performance and stability.  We are currently evaluating several antivirus suites that will provide centrally managed and updated antivirus protection for the whole campus.  The successful candidate will offer a simple central administration console, campus infection monitoring, clients for most (if not all) operating systems in use on campus, access to home users, little effect on system performance, and perhaps a central mail gateway scanning feature.  For more details see "evaluation criteria" below.

The Competition:

The antivirus software field had become enormous over the past few years.  There are many candidates to choose from.  Among the products we are testing are:

For a detailed matrix of the products under consideration and their relative merits please see the decision-making matrix.  Currently we are most interested in products offered by Symantec (Symantec System Console/Norton Antivirus Solution) and Trend (Trend OfficeScan and InterScan VirusWall).

Our current evaluation software:

We have completed product evaluations and have settled on Norton Antivirus as the new desktop antivirus standard. Evaluation of email gateway scanning software is continuing.
If you are interested in testing the Norton antivirus gateway product, set virus2.uvm.edu as your SMTP gateway within your email client. To test the Trend product, set "virus.uvm.edu" as you SMTP gateway.

Evaluation Criteria:

Some things to consider in purchasing an antivirus product:

  1. Performance considerations - does the product adversely affect the client workstation's performance and stability?
  2. Central Management - Can the product's distribution and management be administered from a central server?
  3. Central Monitoring - Can virus infection be recorded and tracked from a central server
  4. Availability of Platforms - Are Macintosh computers supported?  What about Linux?
  5. Frequency of updates - How often are virus definition updates made available?  How often does the client get them?
  6. Cost - What are the up-front and long term support costs?
  7. Availability of client for home/remote users - Can home users/telecommuters use the same product?
  8. Ease of use - How intuitive is the installation and operation of client software?
  9. Availability of e-mail gateway scanning component - Is there a suite component that will function on our UNIX mail gateways?  Is there one for our MS Exchange servers?
Volunteers:

Currently, we are seeking volunteers to help us evaluate these programs.  If you are interested helping, please contact Lynne Meeks (lzm@zoo.uvm.edu) or Greg MacKinnon (jgm@zoo.uvm.edu) in the Computing Information Technology - Client Services department.