Health Checks Could Enhance Computers’ Safety

Microsoft has come up with the idea to implement computer "health checks" before Internet connection is allowed to them so as to bring down the incidences of malware infections.

Corporate vice-president of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, Scott Charney, stated in his important presentation at the RSA Conference 2010 held in San Francisco that cyberspace could follow the healthcare model.

For instance, a cyber equivalent of World Health Organization could make it mandatory for all the systems to pass a malware check before Internet connection is allowed to them.

Clarifying the idea, Charney stated that when people are suffering from diseases and run the danger of passing on the infection to other people, the medical fraternity has invented instruments/methods to ensure the health of the public, as per the news published by INQUIRER on March 3, 2010.

The same idea should actually be applied to the consumer market, where there are majority of botnets. Charney opined that Internet service providers could isolate users operating with a botnet signature till the time they sanitize their operations.

Further, senior director of security engineering strategy at Microsoft, Steve Lipner, informed that computers in several organizations have to first go through malware scanning before they are allowed remote connection to internal networks. However, this is not the case for a vast majority of other computer systems connecting to the Internet, reported ComputerWeekly.com on March 3, 2010.

Lipner also added that malware can be equated to disease as it can potentially affect huge number of online users along with the carrier, as per the news published by bcs on March 3, 2010.

It is comparatively simple for malware to infect a computer as it just requires the user to visit an infected webpage. Besides stealing private details, it can spread to other PCs as well.

Lipner said that this idea is surely possible in terms of technology, but it has to be analyzed from an economic, social and political perspective to evaluate the extent of the feasibility of this idea in the abovementioned context.

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» SPAMfighter News - 3/11/2010