Purchase a new computer over the holidays? UNL employees should be reminded that UNL's antivirus is available as a free download for personally-owned home computers too.
UNL has licensed Symantec Endpoint Protection as the new campus antivirus provider. The antivirus program is available at no charge for use on all university and personally-owned computers. The previous contract with Sophos antivirus ended Dec. 30, 2011.
The three-year agreement with Symantec was licensed at a substantial cost savings to UNL through a Committee on Institutional Cooperation provisioning agreement. UNL joined the Big Ten Conference's CIC in July.
Departmental computer users should first contact local technical support for installation. The antivirus, along with a suite of security tools, will be installed on departmental computers by support staff. All students, faculty and staff are encouraged to install the antivirus on their personal computers.
“Every computer, whether it’s your home PC or a university machine should have antivirus installed,” said Rick Haugerud, security administrator for Information Services. “At UNL, we see literally tens of thousands of attacks on our network each hour. In addition to the network intrusion prevention we have in place, having antivirus on one’s own computer is an important security component.”
Symantec Endpoint Protection works on both Windows and Mac operating systems. The download packages for Windows will automatically remove previous versions of antivirus and will install Symantec.
Symantec Endpoint Protection is recognized as a best-in-class security suite, rated as a Magic Quadrant leader by Gartner.
For more information or to download the antivirus software, go to http://antivirus.unl.edu.