School of Medicine

Virus prevention

To stop the spread of computer viruses, the Wayne State University has a site license with Symantec Inc., maker of the Norton Antivirus applications. The agreement allows you to use specified Symantec Antivirus Corporate or Symantec Endpoint Protection versions for free.  This software and the contract expiration details can be found at the C&IT Norton Software Download page.

The MSIS Networking Services also maintains a Symantec Endpoint Protection Server System that automatically maintains the antivirus definitions on MSIS Managed machines.  This ensures that SOM computers are using the latest updates for protection otherwise you would need to manually update every day. 

In addition, the MSIS Networking Services runs Norton Antivirus for Exchange on the Exchange systems that scans any email attachments, disinfects if possible and delivers warnings to the sender.  On the SOM Email gateway is an Open Source program called MailScanner and ClamAV Antivirus that scans any email attachments, disinfects if possible and delivers warnings to the sender.  Certain attachments that are executable are  refused by the School of Medicine email systems for added protection.  Such attachments would be ones that end in .exe, .com, .bat, .pif, and .scr.  If you need to send those type of attachments via email then you'll need to zip them up using 7zip.

In addition, MSIS Networking Services uses Spamassassin in addition to virus scanning on the SOM Gateway that will tagged messages that it believes to be SPAM email so that SOM users can more easily filter SPAM email from their email clients.  See the MSIS SPAM information page.