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Cisco Working to Block Viruses at the Router
macmouse writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about Cisco and Anti-Virus companies working together to block viruses at the ISP (Router) level. It sounds like they will be using traffic shaping to block malicious traffic. Looking at it in an negative light however, it might mean that your required to have anti-virus software installed in order to use the internet. This can be a *big* problem for *nix/mac users which normally don't need or use AV software. Not to mention, being forced to purchase software from 'company x,y or z' in order to get online, regardless of platform. Hopefully, this is not going to happen."
The router is the new favorite device for censorship. It's the last single-point-of-diversion before the network spreads out again, into the home or office department.
How long before libraries are forced to use scary, sealed products with cuddly names like RouterNanny or RightRoute or PopCop? Where librarians can't adjust or override those kill lists?
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My school requires anti-virus software (Symantec) to be installed on every machine of the network or else your connection gets cut off. Has anyone here even USED the Mac OS X version? Apparently, all it does is throw up error messages on startup. "Live Update could not be found..." "Kernel Extention not loaded" blah blah blah! Ugh! Why would anone make a program that doesn't actually do anything but throw up errors?! I don't think I've ever seen it do anything but. Here's my $40, now give me that antivirus program that doesn't actually check for viruses that could hurt me because there aren't any! Another case of boneheaded IT... I wonder how much the site license set them back...
No, No, NO.
The reason is NOT because Windows is more insecure, or easier to write viruses for, even if that is the case. The reason is the market saturation. 90% of the worlds desktops are running some 32-bit version of Windows, that's a helluva lot of machines to infect. People who write viruses with malicious intentions do it to bring down major infrastructure, and they can do this easily if they infect a few hundred thousand Windows boxes. And the more people that use Windows, the more viruses there will be.
What if everyone used Linux or Macintosh, and there was no Windows boxes left? Then virus coders would work night and day on exploits and trojans for Linux and Mac. It's a matter of deciding on a goal ("to bring down a whole chunk of the global network infrastructure") and then forming a plan ("get all Windows machines to spew out compressed UDP packets of dumbass to every known host").
In conclusion, don't be so smug with your Linux machine during the next round of Welchia or Klez, because if Linux had the desktop market share of Windows, then YOU'D be feeling the pain.
I think you mean 'virii'
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J