A developer takes her laptop home to get extra work done. Before she starts, she disables her antivirus software because it scans every file and tend: bog down the compile. The code compiles, she checks her work and is done with it for the evening. She then reads a few e-mails in her personal account and surfs a couple of Web sites. Before logging off for the night, she decides to upload her just-finished code to the office server, so she accesses the corporate LAN remotely via VPN. Unfortunately, she forgets to reactivate her antivirus software, and unbeknownst to her, the laptop has become infected with the Nimcla worm. The result is Nimda wreaks havoc across the corporation. Welcome to Dennis Peasley's nightmare. A scenario much like this one led Peasley, corporate information security officer at Zeeland, Mich., office furniture giant Herman Miller, to roll out a new breed of security tool―remote policy enforcement software―to 900 remote users worldwide. "If we had remote policy enforcement in place at the time, Nimda never would have gotten into the network," says Peasley, who now uses Zone Labs' Integrity remote policy enforcement tool. "We never would have let the developer in until the firewall and antivirus [signatures] were up to date."
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