The Virus Doctor Is In

Computer viruses can be a serious problem. Without your knowledge, they can erase or alter information stored on your computer. If you share diskettes or Microsoft(R) Word and Excel documents, you risk giving or receiving a virus infection. To protect against computer viruses, you need to use a high quality anti-virus program and be sure to update it regularly.

A program that detects and removes computer viruses is now available at no charge to UW faculty, students, and staff for use on both office and home computers. Thanks to a cooperative effort between several departments, the UW has obtained a campus-wide license for Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit. This cross-platform set of products is popular worldwide and detects more than 11,000 currently known viruses.

Collaborative Effort Recruits Dr Solomon

A campus-wide effort initiated by Mike Ramey, supervisor of the Civil Engineering computer lab, elevated the level of concern about computer viruses and led to a review and evaluation of anti-virus programs by an inter-collegiate committee. Chaired by Steve Graham, computing director for the College of Arts and Sciences, the committee included representatives from Arts and Sciences, the LAN Administrators user group, and Computing & Communications. It looked at different anti-virus products and the terms each campus-wide license offered.

The committee selected Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit based on its superiority in the following areas:

Performance
Applicability across campus desktop platforms (including Macintosh(R), Novell(R), and Windows(R) NT servers)
License distribution terms
Price

Ramey shares the credit for bringing Dr Solomon to campus with many people, including C&C staff who agreed to mange the distribution.

"The most important part of the success of this project is the distribution process," claims Ramey. "It starts with an innovative Web page created by Gretchen Sorenson, with links to self-extracting files prepared by Ryan Campbell and Erin Harding for PCs, and by Mark McNair for Macintosh. Without all these detailed technical tricks, distribution and widespread use of Dr Solomon's would be impossible."

[Photo: Dr
Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit software box.]

Get the Doctor, Quick

For information about Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, to obtain the appropriate software for your system, and to find out where to get documentation and technical support, look on the Web at www.washington.edu/tech_home/ software/drsol.html

For the 1997-98 academic year, Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit will be included as part of the University of Washington Internet Connectivity Kit distributed on CD-ROM (also see the article in this issue of Windows on Computing). Because of dramatic price increases, there may be an extra charge for virus software in the future.

To learn about electronic discussion forums that provide information about viruses and other malicious software of potential interest to the UW community, send the following email message:


          To: listproc@u.washington.edu>
 
          Subject: (may leave blank)
   
          -----Message Text-----

          info comp-virus

For details about computer viruses as well as pointers to other sources of information, visit Dr Solomon's Web site at www.drsolomon.com/

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Computing, No. 20, Autumn 1997
newsltr@cac.washington.edu