Changing Policy on the Fly

摘要

Occasionally, a threat arises that challenges both our policies and our practices. Such was the case with the Bagle worm and its variants. Amazingly, the insidious Bagle fooled users into following manual directions to infect their own computers. To stop it, our IT organization had to make some swift and sweeping changes-in fact, the events I'm about to describe all transpired in a matter of hours. One morning in February, my network manager, Dirk Packett, appeared in my office with our IT security specialist, Jon Garda. Jon reported excitedly that a new, dangerous worm was making its way around the Internet, and that our current architecture couldn't stop it at the border or inside our network-unless we made a significant modification to our e-mail policy. The task was clear. We would have to rewrite our policy against blocking business-related file attachments in just a few hours. Such a change usually takes weeks.