Protecting the University network

All CiCS fileservers are virus scanned every night. All system and user areas are checked, and any infected files are renamed and the incident recorded. If you have a virus in your network area, you'll receive an email about the virus and the names of infected files.

Viruses and email

To protect against viruses via email, filters on the mail hubs (central machines which all emails to @sheffield.ac.uk pass through) will reject any email attachments with the following extensions:

bat, exe, com, jse, js, vbs, vbe, wsh, wsf

You will receive the following message:

This message has been rejected because it appears to have an executable attachment. This form of attachment has been used by recent virus attacks. If you really meant to send this file then please package it up eg. as a zip file and then resend it.

You could send the attachment by renaming it to a different file extension before sending. You must tell the recipient to rename it back to the correct file extension.

You are not protected if you are using non-Sheffield mailing services such as Hotmail, etc - you will need to run a virus scan on any attachment manually.