[312] in winnt
Updates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gerald I Isaacson)
Fri Feb 19 07:35:52 1999
To: huxley@mitvmc.mit.edu
Cc: mitvirus@mitvma.mit.edu, itpartners@MIT.EDU, ntpartners@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 07:35:34 EST
From: Gerald I Isaacson <gii@MIT.EDU>
Bil, I wil try to keep everyone up to date. Your memo points out one
possible confusion about the update numberings. I'll try to explain
what is happening.
The current update for Viuscan is 4009. that is the releae of the dat
(virus signature files) that has been through NAI's full QA testing
and is considered their release product. (An easy way to tell the
release you are on is to right click on the shield icon on the Start
bar and click on about.)
However QA tests take time and new viruses appear frequently. NAI
develops "dat files" and sometimes individual files to address these
new viruses and makes them available on their beta site
(http://beta.nai.com) In fact, they issue hourly updates when necessary.
These have been tested but have not gone through the full QA cycle.
The latest one of these is 4014, though the self-instaler for 4014 is
not available yet.
Because of the rapid spread of happy99 on campus and the dangers
inherent in the Caligula macro virus ecently reported ( it steals PGP Keyrings)
and the picture.exe virus I suggested that we add the 4013 update to
Viruscan. (I assume the self-installing version of 4014 will be
available very shortly)
One side effect of using the "beta" release is that if you have set
your system to get automatic updates from NAI it will return with a
message indicating that your current dat file in newer than the one
being retrieved and it will not retrieve it.
Since most new viruses take a while before they hit campus, I plan on
only recommending a campus wide update to one of the beta relases in
situation like we have now with happy99. Hopefuly that won't be too
often. So normally, your individual update preferences will get teh
monthly releases of new virus files, instead of the weekly release of
the beta files. However, you are free to go to the beta site whenever
you want to get the very latest files and to review the changing list
of new viruses there.
If you have any other questions, please let me know.
Jerry Isaacson
