At 21:04 03/08/01, Ian C. wrote:
> > When I installed InoculateIT, part of the instructions was to
> > remove any other antivirus programs as they would interfere with\
> > its performance. Since ZoneAlarm also checks for viruses, will it
> > interact adversely with InoculteIT? Thanks again, in advance, for
> > your help. Paula Houseworth
> >
>I'm currrently running both on my main machine at home without any
>problems (then again, I'm using the free version of ZoneAlarm).


I run Zone Alarm Pro and use AVP (Kasparsky Antivirus) and Norton
AntiVirus. I don't however have AVP and NAV monitoring the system
all the time. I think antivirus programs warn against also using
other antivirus programs because you shouldn't have two programs
actually scanning files at the same time. If you set one program
to scan only on demand (not all the time), you should be okay. (It
can however be a challenging task to truly disable all the automatic
features of some of these programs.)

Zone Alarm (Free or Pro) sees emails at a very low level in the
networking process (probably before any antivirus program would see
them) and simply changes the file extension of potentially dangerous
email attachment files ...so they can't be run as they were intended
to be run.

As far as I know, Zone Alarm doesn't scan the actual contents of
attachments. (You can specify what attachment file types Zone Alarm
will "quarantine" via changing of file extension. Zone Alarm will
quarantine every attachment with these file extensions...whether or
not they actually contain a virus.

By Zone Alarm's quarantine, I mean that if you double click on one
of these files, Zone Alarm pops up a message suggesting you scan the
file with a real antivirus program. If you choose to, ZA will change
the file extension back to the original type.)

Other antivirus software (hopefully) scans attached files and emails
themselves for patterns in the code that match virus definitions.
This would be after Zone Alarm has done its thing. I doubt Zone
Alarm's method would interfere with any other antivirus program.

Regards,
Bill

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