Posted on Sunday, October 10 2010 @ 22:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Microsoft's corporate vice president for trustworthy computing Scott Charney published a paper in which he called for a "common health policy" that would prevent computers from accessing the Internet until they can produce a "health certificate".
He says this should include the creation of a 'health certificate' system, whereby a machine is checked to make sure 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.
He doesn't say who should be issuing these health certificates.
"Society needs to explore ways to implement collective defenses to help protect consumers who may be unaware that their computers have been compromised, and to reduce the risk that these comprised devices present to the ecosystem as a whole," says Charney in his paper.
More info
at TG Daily.
