At RSA this week, Microsoft’s Scott Charney, head of its Trustworthy Computing initiative, described malware-infected PCs as a threat to the rest of the network.
It’s not a new concept, but Microsoft — fresh off its legal victory that enabled it to take down the massive Waledac botnet — is proposing a somewhat radical solution: When the Internet itself is jeopardized by these spam-spewing botnet hosts, it’s in the public’s best interest to ban them. That’s right: Kick them off the network or off the Net if they pose a public health risk.
Of course, doing that raises still more questions about how just a plan might be enforced, but with Microsoft’s recent victory over Waledac’s operators, some of the answers might already be in place. eSecurityPlanet has the story.
SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft kicked off the RSA Conference 2010 with a bang. It raised the question of whether malware-infected PCs need to get the Typhoid Mary treatment and be thrown off the Internet.
Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), dropped the suggestion during his keynote address to open the show. Charney discussed Microsoft’s recent takedown of a botnet, called Operation b49, which used the legal system to take down a large botnet called Waledac.
He turned to the audience and asked if such a thing should happen on an individual basis. Should a PC that is not protected by anti-malware software and infected with a bot used to spam the online community be kicked off the Net?