ISPs urged to quarantine infected computers
June 3, 2014 – 9:27 PMThe recent effort to disrupt the Gameover Zeus botnet includes plans for Internet service providers to notify victims, but some security researchers think ISPs should play an even bigger role in the future by actively quarantining infected computers identified on their networks.
Law enforcement agencies from several countries including the FBI and Europol announced Monday that they worked with security vendors to disrupt the Gameover Zeus botnet, which is estimated to have affected between 500,000 and 1 million computers.
“Individuals in the U.K. may receive notifications from their Internet Service Providers that they are a victim of this malware and are advised to back up all important information — such as files, photography and videos,” the U.K.’s National Crime Agency said in a statement on its website.
Notifying Internet users of malware infections, especially when their computers become part of known botnets, has become a relatively common practice for some ISPs in recent years.
For example, in the U.S., Comcast introduced security alerts for its Xfinity service subscribers back in 2010, while in Germany the government partnered with ISPs to notify users whose computers are infected with malware on an ongoing basis and help them clean their machines.
However, ISPs should take even a bigger role in the fight against botnets as “desperate times call for desperate measures,” said Rik Ferguson, global vice president of security research at Trend Micro, Monday in a blog post.
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