Practical details - How the EWS part of the AVIEWS works

The Early Warning System is set up to be used via e-mail (which can trigger a page at your end if you have your pager set up for this.) If you are hooked up on a system which forwards e-mail to your pager, we can use that e-mail address. Otherwise, your normal email address will be used. Or, for more comprehensive coverage, we can send alerts and advisories to both your regular email and your email pager addresses.

We don't send alerts to a pager phone number at present, only to pager email.

It is suggested that you use a separate e-mail address to receive alerts so that you know that anything you receive on that address is important and for immediate attention.

Once you are signed up to the AVIEWS, you'll get instructions on how to access lists, both for receiving and sending alerts, and how to use the lists.

Remember, it is the subscribers like yourself who generate the alerts. You could be helping literally millions of others by sharing the information you have! We stopped counting how many desktops were represented by AVIEN members sometime in May 2001, when it reached the 5 million mark.

Read on for some User comments.

• "I have found this service to be of tremendous value. The cost is less than many specialist magazines, but I've found the value far exceeds them. Through the service I have not only had advanced warning of major incidents before any of the anti-virus vendors issued alerts, but I have also been able to discuss with other corporate administrators the true level of prevalence of other incidents which were "all hype and no substance". Additionally, through the volunteer efforts of some of the other members, there have been a number of excellent technical analyses of specific threats posted via the service."
  
• "The EWS saved countless time and effort in every environment where we have perimeter protection. This was particularly evidenced by the effects of the one environment where we were unable to take advantage of the information from the EWS."

• "Think of it like this. With a mass mailer, it could take 20 minutes per machine to clean it. Say only 50% of your 1000 machines are hit - you've still got 20 x 500 machines to clean. That's 10,000 minutes, or 166 man hours to clean your network. If a technician is paid $65 an hour, that's $10,790 that little event has cost you. If only 10% of your network is hit, it's still $2,166 that it cost you to clean that, and that's without counting in down time or loss of data. Now, simple math states that, you only need to have one or two major incidents per year to have made a very large hole in your budget. The advantage of AVIEWS is that you are plugged in to many other large corporations, all over the place. Stopping that major incident then is much simpler as you may have several hours notice before you see the malware. It gives you time to set up a mail block, then sit back and watch the bounces. What's more, in my experience, every major worm in the last 6 months has been picked up by AVIEWS members some hours before even the big vendors have detection updates for them. The annual fee is nothing compared to the cost of a single major incident, and once you've passed your the first milestone of seeing the latest virus totally prevented from entering your network, you'll realize that small dollar amount paid for itself, and what's more, your bosses may well notice that they've more left in the budget at the end of the year. They might even thank you."  

• "It will be the best investment you could ever make. AVIEWS is so useful that I have basically dropped all other virus notification lists. Generally, we are discussing new viruses on AVIEWS hours before the first vendor knows about them. In fact, we are often the ones sending samples to the vendors to let them know about a new virus. In addition to that, we get ongoing analysis of new viruses from members who specialize in that area as well as very fruitful discussions regarding best practices, new methods and procedures, automation techniques, etc., etc.  AVIEWS is by far the best investment we've ever made." 

• Some of our members are very well know in AV circles, including WildList members, professional writers, and experts in virus analysis and decomposition. Part of our purpose is to achieve enough size and clout to have some influence on the direction of development in AV, with an eye toward better large network management and distribution tools. In large part this has been accomplished by inviting folks with similar size and problems to join us in our efforts."

• Using the EWS (Early Warning System) and the various discussion lists of AVI-EWS, I keep myself several steps ahead of most threats. I am able to modify the infrastructure of the companies I manage to block the pending threat days before the major antivirus companies even start to report it. Even though I subscribe to several threat notification distribution lists and paging services, the EWS service and AVIEWS lists always have more timely information than any of the others.
  
  The wide experience of AVIEWS members gives me the ability to have contact with much more seasoned engineers when I have questions or problems. I get real world answers and directions without having to pay outrageous support costs and then find out it's a bug or it's the other guys fault.
  
  I get timely answers and recommendations on what products are the "best of breed" and how to implement them based on my requirements. My customers are small to medium sized businesses with a typical count of 5 to 15 people. As most are reluctant to implement an expensive virus and content filtering firewall, it is imperative to educate the user population as quickly as possible. With EWS, I am able to send out alerts and educate before the threat has made it into a wide spread assault.
  
  AVIEWS has become an integral part of my business model. It is not just for large companies - I get tremendous value out of my investment.

  Steve Clark, President, Clark Systems Support, LLC  http://www.clarksupport.com/

• "It is not often you come across a list like AVIEWS. The information is always up-front, the warnings never without good cause and while the atmosphere is both friendly and unpretentious, it is serious enough to know you can rely on what is said. A must for anyone who is involved in virus protection, be it for 1 computer or 150,000."
  
  
• "Until recently, protecting my client sites from viruses was secondary to maintaining their networks, and we stayed away from most virus issues. The goal was to keep the clients up and running and apply the appropriate patches and keep them current with the most recent virus upgrades. It worked fine until the Nimda virus hit one of my sites. The company was a small business with 4 employees and generated about half million dollars a year through Internet sales. Within a few hours the virus infected 238 online customers and the business was devastated. To a small business, a virus attack can and does drive them out of business. I saw this first hand and this is why I joined AVIEWS. Now the Goner virus shows up. I had two hours advanced notice starting at 9:45am. By the time it hit here I had managed to get all my client sites blocking "scr" extensions. At one point I had over 8000 emails on one client Exchange server with the attachment blocked and that was about an hour before the AV site came out with the updates. Of course I'm glad to have joined AVIEWS and will pay whatever it takes and continue to learn more than I ever wanted to know. I'm delighted to see AV vendors on these lists. The names I see and responses posted have given this group tremendous credibility. I'm delighted to be a part of it."

Ken Nichols, Oncall Computer svs. Dubin, OH