A friend working at the Carter Center in Atlanta passed on this link: F-Secure Framework -- Data Fellows Corporation (Finland)

It looks interesting. Especially in light of the anticipated virus storm.

This outfit keeps up on the current virus situation (50 new viruses listed between 9 Sept. and 10 Oct.). Their analysis of each virus is incredibly detailed.

They also market anti-virus products for DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 / 98, NT Workstation, OS/2, and Linux.

For Windows 3.1, 95 and NT only, they include a feature they call a Gatekeeper ):

"F-Secure Gatekeeper is the worlds first stand-alone proactive anti-virus utility for Microsoft Windows environments. F-Secure Gatekeeper is specially designed to protect PCs against viruses transmitted over the Internet. When files are transferred via e-mail or downloaded from WWW pages or FTP sites, F-Secure Gatekeeper VxD automatically scans them for viruses when they arrive at the computer. Also modem connections to traditional BBS systems are protected similarly.

"F-Secure Gatekeeper uses advanced Dynamic Virus Protection technology (DVP) to automatically activate when a file or a document is stored on your disk, opened for execution or copying, or when a floppy disk is accessed. The benefit of this new technology is to have a full-size scanning engine in memory at all times to effectively protect DOS and Windows sessions from infection. F-Secure Gatekeeper detects not only traditional viruses but also polymorphic and encrypted viruses."

Disclaimer: I have no relation with this firm whatsoever. It looks very promising, but (as always), caveat emptor.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), November 10, 1999

Answers

A lot of good software coming out of Finland...good disk wipes, swap file Scorches...visit newsgroups comp.security.pgp.discuss, etc. It isn't about just PGP.

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), November 11, 1999.

P.S. Much of the privacy ware coming out of Finland is Freeware to non commercial users written by University students. Try www.iki.fi/st/eraser/ for a particularly effective optimized tool for completely wiping a file or freespace on a disk. (35 times using the Gutmann approach)

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), November 11, 1999.