46 Do local area networks (LANs) help to stop viruses or do they facilitate their spread?
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
46 Do local area networks (LANs) help to stop viruses or do they facilitate their spread?
Both. A set of computers connected in a well managed LAN, with
carefully established security settings, with minimal privileges for
each user, and without a transitive path of information flow between the
users (i.e., the objects writable by any of the users are not readable
by any of the others) is more virus-resistant than the same set of
computers if they are not interconnected. The reason is that when all
computers have (read-only) access to a common pool of executable
programs, there is usually less need for diskette swapping and software
exchange between them, and therefore less chances for a virus to spread.
However, if the LAN has lax security and is not well managed, it could
help a virus to spread like wildfire. It might even be impossible to
remove the infection without shutting down the entire LAN. Stories of
LAN login programs, shared copies of which are run on every workstation,
becoming infected are, unfortunately, not uncommon.
A network that supports login scripting is inherently more resistant to
viruses than one that does not *if* this is used to validate the client
before allowing access to the network.
Continue to:
My Books
