Business antidotes

At the corporate level, businesses are mostly doing the right things, most having learnt their lessons from the outbreak of the Melissa virus almost a year ago.

"There are three levels of virus protection - networks, desktops, and email gateways," said Ludgate. "Most organizations protect all three, some do two out of three."

"This provides a good level of automatic protection for users and systems. However, no security solution is 100% impervious," she added.

Both Wilson and Ludgate advise multi-tiered strategies:

Education
Corporations should provide their users with the right level of education about viruses so that they know what to do, and what not to do.

IT managers need to understand the role the Internet is playing and help focus resources on the development of solutions to protect from every security breach and attack.

Update regularly
Keep in touch with your security solutions vendor through the website or local office.

The majority of anti-virus software rely on virus signature updates. Therefore it is necessary to make sure that the very latest signature is used at all times.

"This may mean rolling out new virus signatures more than once per day at times like now," said Ludgate.

Total content security
Anti-viruses are only part of the solution. Protecting your data, your electronic infrastructure requires a long hard look at entry points, access, intrusion, Internet usage and rights enjoyed by users.

Long term strategies to shield enterprises from today's new threats and reduce overall IT costs are required.

Here and now
Several online scanning solutions are already available for use:

Computer Associate's InoculateIT anti-virus solution and updates

Symantec's Internet Security 2000 scans and detects your system.

Trend Micro's free Housecall scanning service

McAfeeB2B's Active Virus Defense which offers an online scanner and cleaner for MS Exchange users to download.

Network Associates' free myCIO.com solution which eliminates the loveletter worm from Microsoft Exchance servers.

Microsoft has put up updates to their Outlook email programs to make it more difficult to inadvertently launch attachments, as well as a MS Exchange administration utility to remove the worm as well as repair public and private information store.