Anti-virus developers and CERT organisations rush to publish information on the latest virus threats on their websites, but how often do you check those sites? Could you take useful action if you received an alert earlier? Was the first you heard of W32/Klez.H from a user, "I clicked on this and something happened", or worse your boss, "What are we doing about this new virus?"
Yui Kee has developed its' own website monitoring software to address this problem. Currently configured to monitor nine major anti-virus websites, it picks out the latest virus information from each and composes a short email when it recognises a significant change. The email is suitable for directing to a pager or mobile phone, and it only contains the site, the virus name and an indication of the severity. However, this is sufficient for an Information Security Manager to understand the basic situation, and know where to get more details. Thus alerted, the IS Manager can take a variety of actions: start downloading the new update, reconfigure the incoming email filters, send a warning email to staff, etc.
Why monitor so many sites? The site that has the first alert for one virus might be last for another, and some sites are more prone to inflating the severity rating they assign, so multiple alerts are a backup and confirm the importance. For more details of this service, please contact us.