Virus-infected computers should be blocked from the Internet and kept in quarantine until they are given a “health certificate,” a top Microsoft security researcher has suggested.
Under the proposed security regime, put forward on Thursday by the technology giant’s computing team, an individual’s Internet connection would be “throttled” to prevent the virus spreading to other computers. However, security experts warned that cutting people off from the Internet could be a drastic step too far and that the question of who would issue and verify the “health certificate” was troubling.
Millions of computers around the world running versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system are infected by viruses without their user’s knowledge and used to generate billions of spam e-mails and attacks against Web sites.
The new proposal, Microsoft claimed, is built on the lessons of public health. Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s computing team, wrote on the company’s blog: “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.”
However, Ram Herkanaidu, a global researcher at computer security firm Kaspersky Lab, said cutting people off from the Internet was a wrongheaded solution.
“This would be a bad idea in practice. Just say your machine was infected — if you could not access the Internet, how would you be able to update your anti-virus and also apply any software patches required? Technically, though, an ISP could give limited access to a safe area so that they could get the relevant updates, but this would be done by individual ISPs themselves.”
Charney said: “In the physical world, international, national and local health organizations 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.”
US and European ISPs have periodically considered blocking virus-infected machines from Internet access and diverting users to cleanup pages. However, they have shied away from it on the basis that it would be costly, while bringing them little direct benefit, as most infected machines would be on other networks.
Presenting his suggestion to the International Security Solutions Europe conference in Berlin, Charney said computers should be required to have a clean “health certificate” before being allowed to connect to the Internet. If a fix is available, the computer would be prompted to download a solution or to update its anti-virus settings.
He conceded that abolishing an individual’s Internet connection “could well have damaging consequences,” proposing that machines have an emergency function whereby users could perform certain activities much like mobile phones and the emergency services safeguard.
Herkanaidu said that there were flaws in the approach.
“Stopping an infected machine from accessing the Internet so that it cannot be used for malicious purposes like sending out spam on the face of it seems sensible,” he said.
“However, it does raise a lot of important questions like: Who would issue the proposed health certificates? What would be the criteria? How often should it be updated? But, more importantly, would it work? At Kaspersky we see over 30,000 new pieces of malware every day — it’s difficult to see how we could have a general scheme that would be able to cope with this,” he said.
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