EIM anti-virus service effective in fighting e-mail invaders

The anti-virus service of Emirates Internet and Multimedia (EIM) screened local PCs from 27,639,000 virus-infected inbound messages between December 22 and April 30.

The vast majority of these were infected by the two latest e–mail viruses; Netsky — more than 20 million — and MyDoom – nearly 3 million.

The service, which has been enabled in response to the growing threats posed by e-mail viruses, protects all types of EIM customers, business and residential, who are hosted by EIM Mail Service.
"The more infected messages sent to the recipient, the more EIM virus cleaning alert messages he/she receives," said Abdullah Hashim, EIM's senior manager for business development and sales.

"This is the reason why EIM subscribers were receiving so many alert messages lately due to the recent outbreak of the Netsky virus."

An integral part of the service was to inform subscribers of the size and volume of threat they would have been exposed to if this anti-virus dynamic protection mechanism was not in place. This is why whenever an e-mail is cleaned an alert message is sent to the recipient informing him/her that EIM has removed a virus from his/her message.

The fact that the EIM anti-virus service proved very effective in combating electronic mail invaders targeting UAE Internet users is reflected in the huge number of virus cleaning alert messages received by customers. On April 14 EIM turned off these alert messages, although the service continues to protect EIM mail subscribers, and accordingly notified its customers on the Customer Care Section at EIM homepage: eim.ae/virusalerts.

EIM will soon offer its customers the option of either enabling or disabling receipt of the virus cleaning alert.

"In the meantime, we will continue to provide maximum protection to our valuable customers from e-mail viruses. For viruses that do not spread via e-mails, like the current Sasser worm, we will keep alerting our customers about their effects and advise them on the most effective ways to protect their systems," added Abdullah.

EIM plans to introduce an anti-spam solution in a move to eliminate the problem. Testing the applicability of the latest technology is currently going on and should become fully operational before the end of this year.

EIM anti-virus is a free service automatically offered to all subscribers for one year until December 22, after which subscribers will have the option of either continuing with it and paying minimal fees or cancelling it with no charges to be paid.