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A senior researcher at Microsoft says that virus infected computers that pose a threat to other PC's should be blocked from accessing the internet.
Scott Charney of the trustworthy computing team said that this concept follows ideas learned from public health situations. Putting infected computers into a temporary quarantine would stop the spread of a virus and allow it to be cleaned.
He said in a blog post “Just as when an individual who is not vaccinated puts others' health at risk, computers that are not protected or have been compromised with a bot put others at risk and pose a greater threat to society. In the physical world, international, national, and local health organisations identify, track and control the spread of disease which can include, where necessary, quarantining people to avoid the infection of others. Simply put, we need to improve and maintain the health of consumer devices connected to the internet in order to avoid greater societal risk.”
One of the biggest issues facing internet security is the Botnet. A sophisicated network of infected computers which can sometimes can account for millions of computers. These can be used by hackers for denial of service attacks and for delivering spam and infected files, to expand the network even further.
Charney suggests that computers should have a health certificate to prove they are uninfected before they can connect to the internet. He further added “Although the conditions to be checked may change over time, current experience suggests that such health checks should ensure that software patches are applied, a firewall is installed and configured correctly, an antivirus program with current signatures is running, and the machine is not currently infected with known malware.”
KitGuru says: Is this a good or a bad idea? would it cure the botnet problem?
Great idea in theory, but considering most of the issues come from holes in Microsoft operating systems, which they cant manage to patch right, I fail to see how they could police something like this accurately. innocent people would be banned due to some sloppy code.
While this sounds like a good idea I am not sure there is a way this can be easily implimented. It would require a very broad standardization to work. Then you would have to get all ISPs to agree wot work in the same parameter listings. Next you would have to get all security software working on the same page.
At the end of the day the logistics would make this a problem with to many loop holes and would take 5 years or more to get all parties involved to even agree on a standard let alone impliment it.
Yeah, we need an arbitrary body of authority to arbitrarily confirm (to whatever standard they see fit) whether or not a machine I’ve built is qualified to send/receive data with other computers. It doesn’t matter if I’m using bandwidth I’ve paid for to access a server I’ve built from my work office..no, the up-link first must be cleared by a third party for the co mutual benefit of all.
This is fucking insane. It’s tyranny. Have we not submit enough liberty to the government? Must we concede it now to powerful monopolistic corporations too?! Heh, watch & see the result of an illegal & brazen SS attempt of iron-fisting access to the internet (dress it up as whatever you want,, but when somethings done for the good of all it’s always a secondary excuse to CONTROLLING some medium) .. hacker types won’t accept this easily.