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County Considering Restraining Internet Access for Employees

The Qakbot virus infected around 90% of the PCs in the county's system, damaging its network for a complete week during April 2011. The Board of Supervisors got to know from Mr. Michael Holmes, Director of Management Information Systems at a meeting on May 02, 2011 that, the virus attack took place despite the updated antivirus software, as reported by The Daily Courier on May 03, 2011.

Only having antivirus software on county workstations is definitely not enough. The county should also have updated firewall safety, spam filtering, and stringent, evidently enforced employee user policies at the workstations. Permitting employees to access private e-mail and search Craigslist, Facebook and other social media platform is an open invitation to virus attacks.

Commenting on the matter, Chip Davis, Supervisor, District 3, stated that, such a policy would also be advantageous for enhancing the productivity levels. He further stated that, it might be more competent, if they concentrate on their work and read e-newspaper at home, as reported by Verde Independent on May 04, 2011.

Another District 2 supervisor, Tom Thurman, stated that, they need creating different means of conducting things within every department. He further recommended a policy that would restrict access to job-associated search only. He further added that, it is no longer searching Craigslist. It is actually going have to be preventive.

Carol Springer, Board Chairman, District 1, warned against moving excessively rapidly. She stated that, she thinks they have to be a bit extra cautious regarding a knee-jerk reaction. She stated that, several times, where there is a disaster, people's reaction is to move out and do whatever they can to ensure that it doesn't take place again, as reported by in Verde Independent on May 04, 2011.

Nonetheless, she further added that, she would extremely dislike seeing themselves setting up several bureaucratic rules when so many of their employees makes use of the Internet.

Nevertheless, if other businesses in the US took such a lazy approach to employee productivity and took network security as casually as the nation seems to have before the Qakbot attack, clients would not conduct business with them.

Significantly, if county Management Information System employees have just begun to look at the development of a back-up intranet, it is yet another signal that they are still following behind the horse rather than being in front of it.

Related article: Canada - A Major Stimulator of Spam, Says Cisco

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