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April 9, 2002 - The Anti-Virus Information Exchange Network (AVIEN.org) has reached a new high in terms of representing the user community. Hundreds of organizations from around the world, representing more than 5 million PCs, have signed up for membership in AVIEN since it was formed less than 18 months ago. AVIEN is a grassroots effort to ensure that the information needed to fight viruses and other malware is shared. Members of AVIEN are consistently vocal with their enthusiasm about its impact on their work. "AVIEN has kept me ahead of the curve, and given me advance warning of virus outbreaks on the average of four hours before vendor alerts" said Kenneth Bechtel of Team Anti-Virus. "The conversations with other professionals supporting an enterprise environment are extremely helpful, and provide me with a virtual team comprising a vast amount of knowledge and experience. This kind of self-supporting and non-competitive knowledge sharing was a long time coming, and I've seen it in no other place." Members of AVIEN communicate with each other on a constant basis via the email lists to which they subscribe. Whenever any one of the members spots something out of the ordinary, they quickly alert the others in the network, providing them with insight into up-coming threats and the knowledge required to proactively enhance safeguards as required. Imagine having at your fingertips, or closest email account, access to key anti-malware specialists world-wide that will help provide immediate protection against the latest virus threats. That is exactly what AVIEN provides: immediate and accurate notification in a timely manner on new virus threats. This has continued to allow us to be successful in our fight against new virus threats. AVIEN members have reported a significant decline in the number and severity of virus related security incidents over the past year. Much of this positive move is the result of being plugged into a network of their peers. Ron Baklarz, Chief Information Security Officer at The American Red Cross, said "Joining AVIEN was an integral part of my "Incident Avoidance" program. In the last year, there were several instances when the AVIEN early warning system saved us from contracting computer viruses and worms. Membership in AVIEN is cost-effective, informative, and the participants are world-class names in the war against malicious code." Vendor involvement Anti-virus product vendors such as Central Command, Computer Associates, Network Associates, Symantec, Trend and Anti-virus service providers MessageLabs have also jumped on board the AVIEN train. A special section called the EWS (Early Warning System) was set up to allow representatives from these vendors to share their virus knowledge in a marketing-free zone. Subscription to the EWS mailing lists is open to companies of all sizes, while AVIEN membership is limited to organizations with at least 1500 PCs. AVIEN membership includes a subscription to the EWS. More information
on AVIEN and the EWS, both of which operate on a not-for-profit basis
with low annual fees to offset operating costs,
can be found at their web site: www.avien.org. |
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