TelkomInternet, a division of partially privatised South African telecommunications giant Telkom, has quarantined more than 500 000 virus-infected e-mail messages mostly infected with the MyDoom virus, the telecommunications company announced on Thursday.
TelkomInternet reports that 456 503 virus-infected e-mail messages or about 92% of the total it has quarantined since January 26 were MyDoom-infected.
MyDoom is an e-mail virus that started attacking many company systems globally late January, generating infected e-mails that are spreading through the internet at an unprecedented pace.
Telkom’s firewall has fought off the onslaught of the rampant MyDoom for its TelkomInternet customers, demonstrating the effectiveness of its technology.
TelkomInternet product specialist Craig Medefindt said: “TelkomInternet has once again come to the rescue of its customers fearful of virus-infected e-mails. Telkom’s internet tools, such as anti-virus and spam filtering, block destructive data, as in the case of the Sobig.F bug last year.
“TelkomInternet tools, which are supplied free as part of the package, come in handy as internet users the world over battle cyber attacks. TelkomInternet operates a blocking system through a qmail scanner, which provides plug-in anti-virus and anti-spam capabilities to the Telkom internet mail system,” he added.
This is based on the Open-Source Clam virus scanner and the Open Anti-Virus database, with virus definitions being automatically updated every 12 hours from the global threat database, or manually at any time if a new threat is identified.
TelkomInternet has urged customers encountering difficulties to contact its technical support centre. — I-Net Bridge