Not one student or faculty member can survive a day on campus without it: e-mail. The free flow of fast, free and reliable communication acts as an essential core of the University of Illinois campus. But with our most reliable and frequent form of communication comes many obstacles and problems, and last Wednesday the University of Illinois Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) began to battle some of those e-mail annoyances.

The introduction of a brand new, server side anti-virus software on Wednesday heralded the beginning of CITES’s latest service for the campus community. With 800,000 to 1 million e-mail messages a day going through the CITES network, the potential for viruses coming into University inboxes is high, but according to Mike Corn, Director for Security Services and Information Privacy, that’s now starting to change.

“We’re deleting 15 to 20,000 viruses a day. That’s a lot of viruses,” Corn said about the viruses that the new anti-virus software has caught.

Identifying infected e-mail is a rather simple practice. Each virus contains a signature that is unique to it, and the anti-virus software scans for these signatures in the e-mails before allowing them within the network. If a virus signature is found, the program deletes the e-mail and the campus inboxes never receive the infected message. Corn mentioned that the viruses being caught are not anything new, most of them have been around for years.

Some campus e-mail users might be concerned about losing legitimate e-mail to the automated virus scanning software, but Corn said the software is very reliable.

“We’re very, very confident about the scanning engine,” Corn said. “When it says it’s a virus, it’s a virus, there’s no doubt. We were very confident that this was a legitimate thing to do to e-mail.”

As a student who has twice been a victim of viruses, each incident during finals week, it’s music to my ears that something is being done to prevent a fatal loss of data during the time I should be spending studying.

From Aug. 7, 2004, to Sept. 23, 2004, CITES handled 596 security incidences. Of those, 92 percent were virus related, and Corn estimates that the cost to the University for some of those could run as high as $500 per incident. It’s obvious that a solution is highly desired that reduces the

number of incidences.

While the new anti-virus software is being installed to help reduce the number of security issues within the CITES network, Corn warns that the server side is not the end all solution to the virus problem.

“What we don’t want people to do is stop running their desktop anti-virus,” Corn said. “Anytime we do something centrally, people assume they don’t have to do anything any more, and that’s wrong.”

Between spyware, trojans, worms and other compromising forms of viruses, a more complete solution can be found if students, faculty and staff use the anti-virus software on their personal computers in addition to CITES’s new server side solution. Still, it’s not a bad idea to back-up your mp3 collection and term papers.

While the anti-virus is a big and much welcomed improvement to the University network, it’s only half of the solution that CITES has in store. In April, CITES plans to launch in several phases a user-friendly and customizable antispam solution as well.

Finally, no more advertisements for Viagra. That’s something to look forward to.