HARDIN MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, ELIZABETHTOWN KY

W32/Sobig arrives in the inbox as an e-mail attachment with a .pif or .scr extension. When run, this high-risk worm infects the host computer, then e-mails itself (using its own SMTP engine) to harvested e-mail addresses from the victim’s machine. Because it sends so many emails, Sobig saps bandwidth and slows network performance. It can even open up a user’s computer port, making it vulnerable to hackers.

But the employees at Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown , Kentucky , have nothing to worry about. Debbie Timmer, Hardin’s network administrator for the past seven years, uses C2C’s Active Folders Content Manager to identify and dispose of virus-infected e-mail. Since Active Folders can be set to clean Exchange’s Information Stores in advance of the anti-virus software, it is part of Hardin’s layered defense against viruses.

“The Sobig virus had two separate attachments and I set Active folders to look for those attachments since legitimate e-mails would not have attachments with *.pif or *.scr,” she says. “I set those to dumb into a dummy folder, reviewed them to verify that they were a problem, then deleted them. I used it until the virus scanner caught up and caught about 1,500 viruses.”

In addition discovering and removing viruses, Active Folders helps enforce a centralized e-policy for greater security and minimize liability associated with inappropriate e-mail content. Timmer, the sole administrator of Hardin’s Exchange server and 490 mailboxes, also uses Active Folders to track misuse of the e-mail system. E-mail jokes, for example, can spread quickly throughout Hardin Memorial Hospital , a regional health care facility with a medical staff of more than 140 active physicians.

“The first time I see an abundance I send a warning note about the systems usage. The second time it gets more threatening,” she explains. Timmer used Active Folders to delete e-mails that have been sitting in Exchange for over three years. “I deleted about 500 messages, which saves about 20 GB,” she says. “But more recently the ability to scan for attachments that are carrying viruses has become extremely important. I can find e-mails based on certain criteria and delete those that have viruses. Active Folders makes it much easier to respond to the threats that are prevalent today in the e-mail. It works fast and it works well.”