Anna virus spurned by user group

Feb. 13, 2001 -"Once again AVIEN proves its worth" was the consensus this morning amongst members of the Anti-Virus Information Exchange Network (AVIEN). This growing network of organizational users of anti-virus products suffered as a whole little from yesterday's outbreak of the "Anna" virus.

"Thanks to Nortel's participation in AVIEN, we were able to adequately address an all-out computer epidemic well before it inundated our Corporation. As a result, less than 50 of our nearly 100,000 employees had an infected computer." said Pete Sherwood, Senior AntiVirus Analyst, Nortel Networks.

Members of AVIEN started discussing the virus shortly after 10am, EST. Realizing that this virus was spreading world-wide and was growing, the decision was made in the group to send out an EWS (Early Warning System) alert to subscribers.

"Being 'ahead of the game' is our protection and AVIEN puts us 'way ahead'. commented David Phillips, Project Officer at The Open University in the UK.

With the EWS alert broadcast, subscribers who may not have been following the active discussion in the AVIEN mailing list were able to quickly jump on board and respond to the threat.

"The EWS alert list is the best virus list I've ever been on. I was notified of virus outbreaks before many major Virus Vendors were reporting the outbreaks on their sites or virus alert lists. Clients of our organization started receiving viruses shortly AFTER being notified by our internal alert list. I would highly recommend the AVIEN to any manager of virus defences." said David Bass, MCSE (PricewaterhouseCoopers Virus Core Team Lead).

During the day, anti-virus vendors provided updates to the information on the virus. For members of AVIEN, this was just another virus by now, as they had battened down the hatches hours earlier.