A film starring Penelope Cruz opened the
festival |
Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus protection for businesses, has
reported that it successfully protected the Cannes Film Festival
from all virus attacks during the course of the prestigious event.
Sophos's world leading anti-virus protection was installed on
300 computers used across the festival, 40 of which were in the
press room used by media representatives from around the world.
In total, 250 virus alerts were recorded during the course of
the ten day event. An analysis shows clearly the risks to which the
festival would have been exposed had they not had anti-virus
protection in place.
The majority of virus attacks (80%) prevented by Sophos
Anti-Virus originated from the internet and attempted to infect via
email. Additionally, a number of festival attendees used the KaZaA
file-sharing network and reports showed that a number of viruses
were prevented from infecting festival computers via that route.
Cedric Lemoigne, the festival's IT manager responsible for
administering Sophos Anti-Virus, quickly identified those who were
putting their computers at risk, and was able to educate them about
the risks of downloading potentially dangerous code from the
internet.
Festival organisers were particularly pleased to be protected
against the W32/Sobig-B worm, which
disguised as an email from Microsoft became widespread across the
internet during the course of the film festival. The computers at
the festival were able to "bounce off" Sobig-B's attacks as they
had been automatically updated a few hours before, perfectly
illustrating the benefits of automatically updating anti-virus
protection on a regular basis. W32/Klez-H, a worm which
has been spreading widely since early 2002 attempted to cause
disruption, representing 6% of the attacks made on the Cannes Film
Festival's network. However, like all other attacks it was easily
stopped by Sophos Anti-Virus.
"It is important for organisations such as ours to keep our
anti-virus protection constantly up to date," commented Cedric
Lemoigne, IT Manager for the Cannes Film Festival. "With Sophos, we
were able to offer absolute protection, and we look forward to the
next Festival in Cannes."
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.