Ban sick PC’s from internet say Microsoft

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?

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