Do local area networks (LANs) help to stop viruses or do they facilitate their spread?
Both. A set of computers connected in a well managed LAN, with carefully established security settings, with minimal privileges for each user, and without a transitive path of information flow between the users (i.e., the objects writable by any of the users are not readable by any of the others) is more virus-resistant than the same set of computers if they are not interconnected. The reason is that when all computers have (read-only) access to a common pool of executable programs, there is usually less need for diskette swapping and software exchange between them, and therefore less ways through which a virus could spread. However, if the LAN is not well managed, with lax security, it could help a virus to spread like wildfire. It might even be impossible to remove the infection without shutting down the entire LAN. A network that supports login scripting is inherently more resistant to viruses than one that does not, if this is used to validate the client before allowing access to t
