Interesting article about viruses

Filed in by Kirk Averett | April 11, 2005 10:27 am

Here is an article with a lot of interesting facts and figures about viruses in 2004: CRN.[1]

I won’t ruin the article, but a lot more viruses caused problems, the average time it took to recover became longer, and (not suprisingly) costs to recover went up.

I’ll renew my earlier recommendation that multiple layers of anti-virus protection be used whenever possible.  Putting two anti-virus programs on the same computer is generally not a good idea, but protecting servers– and particularly email servers– as well as regular desktop machines should be standard practice.

Some Anti-virus Programs

There are some anti-virus programs that are free for noncommercial use (see their sites for definitions).  Here are three that I have tried at various times:

Avast![2] free home edition
Antivir[3] personal edition
AVG[4] free edition

There are *way* too many commercial anti-virus programs for me to track.  All of the products above have corresponding commercial programs, but here are a few more for small businesses:

Panda Software
Trend Micro[7]

We Use

On our email servers we use F-Prot for servers with ClamAV, an open-source anti-virus program that works on Linux.  We encourage our customers to use another layer of anti-virus software on their desktops & laptops!


  1. CRN.:
  2. Avast!:
  3. Antivir:
  4. AVG:
  5. McAfee:
  6. Symantec:
  7. Trend Micro:
  8. F-Prot:

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