McAfee puts an end to infectious viruses

The antivirus industry received its annual boost with Michelangelo's birthday last week. The Michelangelo virus mysteriously reappears every year on March 6 to catch users out by erasing their data.

In response, antivirus software vendor McAfee has risen to the occasion with a clutch of services to keep data secure.

On offer this year are free trials of the vendor's antivirus software, extended customer support hours and a free fax-back service offering Michelangelo prevention tips.

But the vendor also wants to make sure there are no bugbears for any platforms by providing its first antivirus scanner for Sun Solaris called Virusscan. The launch is part of McAfee's mission to support all enterprise network security and management platforms, such as Netware, Windows NT, Unix and the Internet.

The product is able to detect over 6,000 computer viruses, including stealth viruses, encrypted viruses and the latest macro viruses. It supports directory tree scanning and several reporting options.

The first release, due to ship this month, supports Solaris 2.4, but follow ups to support Solaris upgrades are planned for the third and fourth quarters of this year.

Igor Grebert, McAfee antivirus product manager, said: 'Despite the relative lack of Unix-specific viruses, servers can harbour viruses that are capable of infecting network attached workstations running other operating systems such as Dos and Windows.' Grebert said: 'Virusscan for Solaris will plug a major security hole that has been left open by traditional antivirus vendors. This is where they have neglected to recognise the importance of Unix file server security in heterogeneous network environments.'

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