Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 08/13/07 issue

You are naked without it

GCN Lab review | Antivirus programs seek and destroy malicious code waiting to pounce on remote systems

By John Breeden II

An antivirus program used to be like an insurance policy on your car: something that came in handy should you have an accident. But as the amount of malicious code has increased, antivirus has become more like oil in your engine. Your computer might run a little ways without it, but it won’t get far.

The core of any good security system is antivirus, though anti-spyware and anti-spam protection are also important. During the past few years, the GCN Lab has reviewed appliances that sit at the gateway to a network and zap all kinds of malicious code before it even hits an agency e-mail server. But what about traveling employees or teleworkers? Sure, they can connect to the office via a virtual private network or other secure link, but that might not always be available. Those mobile warriors need personal protection when away from their agency’s digital fortress.

Thankfully, there are many security options for laptop PCs or stand-alone desktop PCs. The GCN Lab took a look at six programs designed to make the road a little bit safer. Specifically, we looked at antivirus programs and tested them for functionality — how well they were able to detect and zap all the stealth viruses we threw at them — ease of use, scan speeds and value.

To first prove the need for antivirus programs, we setup a honey-pot system on a laptop PC loaded with fake credit card numbers, a document we labeled top- secret and several MP3 files. The laptop was left outside the lab’s firewalls and appliance-based protections, sitting powered and vulnerable like a goldfish swimming with sharks. The system was remotely monitored 24 hours a day, but otherwise no interference was given to any would-be hackers.

Surprisingly, it took 49 hours before the first intrusion occurred. That person took the MP3s and the fake credit card numbers, but had no interest in the top-secret document. For good measure, they dropped a P variant of the Netsky virus into the system on their way out. Nice guy. We traced the intruder’s IP address to a server in the Far East.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Software Applications



GCN Popup