Melissa swamps anti-virus firms too
By Margaret Kane
March 30, 1999
ZDNN

The folks in your IT department aren't the only ones being run ragged by the Melissa virus.

Software engineers and researchers at anti-virus companies have been busy around the clock since Friday, trying to keep up with the demand for patches and other protective measures, officials at anti-virus companies said Tuesday.

"Basically we've dedicated all of our resources to this," said Carey Nachenberg chief researcher at Symantec Corp.'s (Nasdaq: SYMC) anti-virus research center."

Nachenberg said Symantec's site has been getting three times the normal number of hits. The company added another Web server Tuesday to keep up with the traffic.

Things are the same at Trend Micro Inc., where downloads of HouseCall, a scanning product that checks for viruses, rose 400 percent from Friday to Monday.

"We added bandwidth yesterday and people were here all weekend watching the servers to make sure they were up and running," said Susan Orbuch, a company spokesperson. The company's corporate product, which scans Microsoft Exchange servers for viruses, was updated Sunday afternoon, and was accessed 1,800 times by 8 a.m. Monday.

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