In a recent interview, Scott Charney, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing, suggested that the businesses should follow health care’s model of quarantining infected PCs from your network to prevent them from being used to send spam and conduct attacks on other users. Here are some of his comments:

When people get diseases and run the risk of contaminating other people, the medical community has devised mechanisms to help ensure the public’s health. It’s a combination of inspection, quarantine, and treatment. In today’s computing enterprises, we have Network Access Protection…The theory is if a machine is known to be infected do you want it to connect to the network and infect everyone else? Or do you want to take it offline, clean the machine, and then let it connect? The concept isn’t that complicated, but the challenge is in the implementation.
The Internet is so many things for consumers. It’s a way to engage in free speech, to engage in online commerce, to get education, to seek health care information. Their lives center around this technology in so many important ways. And they’re used to the PC being in their home. It’s considered a very private device in a way. And it may be storing a lot of private sensitive data, like your diary or your tax records. But what we’ve seen is that when people get infected they may not be the ultimate victim. The ultimate victim might be the person who receives more viruses and spam directed by the originally infected PC. You can tell people to make sure they’ve updated your machines, running antivirus, and backing up data, yet we still see a lot of people who just don’t do that. So, the question becomes how do you create a less infected Internet? Quarantining and disconnecting machines at the source is an important place to start.

If you have any questions or concerns about the integrity of your security infrastructure, never hesitate to call Responza so we can stop problems before they start and help you retain peace of mind.