Comment It's the responsability of the ISPs to monitor... (Score 2, Interesting) 260
The "Average Joe" user isn't able to monitor their own PC for spyware, virus, or bot activity. I worked for my school's student computer repair group and I'd have to say 90% of the issues we had were related to viruses that were passed through AIM and email and spyware choking the systems to a halt. The other 10% were legitimate hardware or software issues (such as Windows imploding on itself or a NIC going bad).
Our school even gives out "free" (as in hidden in our tuition costs) copies of Norton (really Symantec, but I don't want to give up the old name) AV that takes care of many spyware threats and the vast majority of virus threats. The IT department also highly recommends that students use Spybot S&D or AdAware to remove and prevent spyware from getting a hold of their computers.
Most students just didn't care enough to worry about using the anti-virus and spyware tools that were provided to them. I've even been told by numerous people that running the tools makes their computers slow and they don't want to have it be slow when they are playing Snood.
The only way my school was able to successfully fight virus/bot activity on the network and prevent the entire campus from being taken over is to block users with "suspicious" activity (too many emails in a short period of time or too much outbound bandwidth in a short period of time were two tests that I knew of) from using the network until they can demonstrate that their computers are fully repaired.
The IT department used that technique to successfully stop Blaster and many of the other worms that hit our campus before too many computers were affected. Though it's "rule with an iron fist" at its best, it worked and made the network much safer for the rest of the population.
Without my school running things like this, it would have just been a matter of time before most of the computers on campus were taken over.
Our school even gives out "free" (as in hidden in our tuition costs) copies of Norton (really Symantec, but I don't want to give up the old name) AV that takes care of many spyware threats and the vast majority of virus threats. The IT department also highly recommends that students use Spybot S&D or AdAware to remove and prevent spyware from getting a hold of their computers.
Most students just didn't care enough to worry about using the anti-virus and spyware tools that were provided to them. I've even been told by numerous people that running the tools makes their computers slow and they don't want to have it be slow when they are playing Snood.
The only way my school was able to successfully fight virus/bot activity on the network and prevent the entire campus from being taken over is to block users with "suspicious" activity (too many emails in a short period of time or too much outbound bandwidth in a short period of time were two tests that I knew of) from using the network until they can demonstrate that their computers are fully repaired.
The IT department used that technique to successfully stop Blaster and many of the other worms that hit our campus before too many computers were affected. Though it's "rule with an iron fist" at its best, it worked and made the network much safer for the rest of the population.
Without my school running things like this, it would have just been a matter of time before most of the computers on campus were taken over.
