Virus and Safe Computing
Student, Faculty, Employee Personal Computers
ITS now provide antivirus software for personal machines that belong to students, faculty, or employees. We highly recommend that you obtain such software for your personal machine. More information on this can be found here, on our Virus Information Page for Students and Home Users.
All Oxy email accounts have some basic level of virus protection. The Exchange (Webmail / Outlook) system is equipped with virus software that scans all incoming and outgoing emails for viruses. This means that the likelihood of receiving an email which has a virus on your Oxy Exchange email is extremely low. This software is updated on a regular basis, and upon news of any virus alert it is updated immediately.
All Managed Computers On-Campus
ITS maintains virus protection software on all computer lab, faculty, and administrative desktops and laptops. We use Network Associates' McAfee VirusScan product to protect all machines, and update it weekly. This software has the feature of not only protecting the desktop / laptop from virus infection, but can also scan and clean most viruses from infected files on your floppy diskettes, zip drives, and downloaded files. To be sure that the software is up-to-date, you can right-click on the VShield icon () and select About. The date of the virus definitions will be listed on the screen, and generally they should be no older than a week. If they are, please call the Helpdesk at x.2880 and we will resolve the problem.
Our latest version of this software allows ITS to receive reports of all virus detections from all of the desktops and make sure that every machine is up-to-date. This means that we are prepared to configure virus software on the desktop remotely, as well as respond to an outbreak by updating all the machines automatically.
Additional Network Protection
All of our network file servers are equipped with virus software that detects any files containing viruses.
Additionally, our firewalls protect all computers on the network (this includes students' machines in the residence halls) from off-campus viruses and hackers that attempt to infect computers by connecting to them directly, placing infected files in any open network shares.