But that method made the company’s network vulnerable, Finlay says. So she initiated a system to keep antivirus software consistently up to date on both Windows NT servers and desktops at all 10 sites. "Whenever we’ve been hit since, having this process in place makes things run more smoothly," Finlay says. Still, she says she’s looking to companies such as Symantec for help. "It’s very labor-intensive and confusing to gather intelligence around an impending virus," she says.

Recognizing Friendly E-Mails Among the Foes

CIOs face a quandary when they get scrupulous about e-mail filtering. They want to keep out the "Cheap Viagra" messages, but they don’t want to filter out serious, work-related e-mail in the process.

Sean Bagshaw, CTO of Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), tackled this problem recently. E-mail the company sends out?newsletters and other information?is often blocked as spam because some of MBA’s banking members include the word mortgage on their e-mail blacklists. "You are constantly fighting to get off the [black]list," he says.

To fix the problem, Bagshaw asks member companies to add MBA’s e-mail to their white-list. But Bagshaw is also considering joining a Bonded Sender program through IronPort Systems. Bonded Sender uses a third party to certify that an e-mail sender has met specific antispam standards and has put up cash to back that. Under the system, MBA would put up a bond for, say, $50,000, which ensures a marketing campaign is not spam. A debit from the bond is collected if the third party finds MBA in violation. About 18,000 organizations participate in the program.

At ABM, the building services contractor whose CEO was hit by the Blaster virus, a blacklist mishap last year prompted a policy change, Finley says.

Blacklists blocked important e-mail coming in to ABM and prevented the company from sending mail to its customers. Finley says the company missed a sales opportunity last year because its software filtered out an e-mail from a potential customer who had sent a business inquiry to the sales department from a home address. The prospective customer later followed up, asking why no one from ABM responded to the e-mail. (The salesman, of course, never got the e-mail, Finley says.) In response, ABM hired a full-time employee to sift through thousands of filtered spam messages to identify spam patterns and catch legitimate e-mails.

And, Finley says, he still battles the ISPs that have kept ABM on their blacklists?an unfortunate side effect that occurred when an e-mail spoofer rerouted spam e-mail messages through ABM’s corporate servers so it appeared that ABM was the sender. "We have to call and threaten legal action and say, ’You better unblock us,’" he says.