Virus protection for Exchange?

[BOFH1]

What is the best way of protecting Exchange from viruses is the server itself at risk or just the clients that collect from it ?

How well does say Symantec Anti Virus protect against attachment viruses and is it effective when email is in the exchange database?

Obviously I try to keep our client AV up to date, but I feel this should be a last resort.

Any advice from experienced Exchange admins would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Zelandakh]

Symantec scans the virtual SMTP server and catches viruses on the way in. Therefore they never get as far as the database.

Clients can pick up viruses from web pages and push them out by email so you need to keep the clients up to date too. If you get Norton Corporate, it updates itself.

Been running Norton/Symantec Anti Virus across the organisation for many years and (touch wood) have not been compromised anywhere.

 

[BOFH1]

Excellent we do use Symantec corp edition.

Do viruses ever effect the Exchange server itself or is the payload just passed to the client that then opens it (if symantec misses it)?

Thanks

 

[quell]

We use Symantec also and have never had any problems. On the email server we have Symantec for exchange installed plus Symantec corp ed for the rest of the system. All LAN pc's get there up dates from this server and the server automatically updates itself. So everyone is always up to date on the latest viri def.

>Do viruses ever effect the Exchange server itself or is the payload just passed to the client that then opens it (if symantec misses it)?
Yes viruses can effect the exchange server. If symantec misses the new virus....it is passed on. If symantec does not have the latest viri def to define what the virus is it will not know that it is a virus. For this reason it is a good idea to also filter file attachments such as .exe, .scr

 

[BOFH1]

Thanks for the reply's.

I take it symantec for Exchange is an addon?

 

[quell]

>I take it symantec for Exchange is an addon?
I wouldnt consider it a addon. It is a seperate product that you order. Ours came with the Symantec Corp ed package.


Here is a description if you want to use Symantec

http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/products.cfm?ProductID=66&EID=0

Here you can get a trial ver:

https://enterprisesecurity.symantec...cfm?SSL=YES&ProductID=1062&PromoCode=wmailsec

 

[LenX4]

We have Exchange 5.5 running on an NT server. Also running Norton AV Corp 7.6. Everything was fine until a temp IT guy installed some kind of service pack. This seemed to break the scan engine and he left.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled Norton AV and all file scanning seems to be working fine. However it is not scanning the email going through exchange. I do not seem to have the Exchange portion installed or working. I looked through both Norton CDs and can't find anything else to install.

Anybody know what I'm missing. The Norton doc's aren't helping.

 

[zbnet]

Viruses only affect the Exchange server itself if they are run on the server. This is very unlikely.

That's not to say that an Exchange store can't be hosting viruses that have come in via email and not been picked up by a perimeter virus checker, or introduced via a client that surfed the web or read a hotmail message that had a virus. So, like Zelandakh says, keep your client computers up to date as well.

The company I work for has never run any antivirus on its Exchange servers in 8 years, and isn't planning to start now.

 

[LenX4]

Thanks, my client computers are OK.

Before my rebuild, my exchange server would catch E-mails with viruses before they were sent to the client. It used to catch the viruses on the way in; I want to get that functionality back.

Any idea why my installation is not doing that any more?