UAMS ADMINISTRATIVE GUIDE

NUMBER: 7.2.13
DATE: 8/01/00
REVISION:

SECTION:	INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
AREA:	SERVICES
SUBJECT:	E-MAIL ATTACHMENT BLOCKING & VIRUS INFECTED E-MAIL MESSAGES

SCOPE

UAMS Workforce.

POLICY

E-mail viruses are becoming increasingly common. One of the industry-wide guidelines for reducing risk of virus infection to organizational networks and workstations is to "block" high-risk attachments at the firewall level. The block prevents virus-type attachments from becoming widely available. UAMS will utilize automatic tools to block high risk attachments within email.

PROCEDURE

1: Virus protection on the local workstations will block messages from internal users that contain viruses.

2: Infected messages coming to UAMS recipients from external sources or the Outlook web client will be cleaned or dropped at the email gateway.

3: High risk attachments (exe, bat, com, scr, vbs, pif) will be stripped from all messages both internally and externally. The user will receive the email with an “alert.txt” attached.

4: In the event of a major trojan or virus breakout that utilizes a particular file extension for propagation, such extension will be blocked until a patch is available to negate it