Preventive medicine key, even for computer viruses

The recent outbreak of Internet viruses shows how heavily some doctors depend on computers and e-mail, and the importance of protecting those business tools.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Sept. 15, 2003.

Since mid-August, William C. Miller, MD, a solo internist in Cincinnati, has been deleting hundreds of e-mails flooding his inbox because of Sobig.F, one of several "worms" unknown writers of computer viruses unleash on the Internet daily.

"My computer was not infected, but I clearly was affected," Dr. Miller said. At the peak of the virus he received about 500 e-mails per day, five times the usual traffic. "It's easy enough to delete them; it's just a darn nuisance."

Thanks to up-to-date anti-virus software and other computer security practices, Dr. Miller escaped relatively unscathed. But other computer users worldwide weren't as fortunate, underscoring how crucial it is for physicians to take steps to keep viruses from bringing their computer networks -- and practices -- to a grinding halt, physicians and computer security experts say.

"Corporate America and this whole country rely heavily on e-mail, the Internet and computer networks," said Daniel Z. Sands, MD, MPH, an internist and clinical systems integration architect at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "It's important, obviously, that we use good, safe computing techniques."

The threat that hacker-created viruses pose will only grow worse. Even if you escaped damage from the trio of Internet worms that felled scores of computer networks worldwide last month -- Blaster, Nachi and Sobig.F -- you may not be safe. Another variant of Sobig.F was expected to strike after Sept. 10, the date the creator of Sobig.F set for the virus to time out. And, that new variant is hardly the only immediate threat computer users face, said Kevin Haley, group product manager for the security response team at Symantec Corp., an anti-virus software company that detects 600 to 700 new computer viruses monthly on the Internet.