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Comcast's War On Infected PCs (Or All Customers)
thadmiller writes "Comcast is launching a trial on Thursday of a new automated service that will warn broadband customers of possible virus infections if the computers are behaving as if they have been compromised by malware. For instance, a significant overnight spike in traffic being sent from a particular Internet Protocol address could signal that a computer is infected with a virus, taking control of the system and using it to send spam as part of a botnet." Update: Jason Livingood
of Comcast's Internet Systems Engineering group sent to Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list a more detailed explanation of what this trial will involve.
As long as they don't act upon this information I don't see any issue with it. I bet most run-of-the-mill users don't know they have the infection and could act upon it if they knew.
Sounds like a win-win for both Comcast and their customers if it's informational only.
"The new service will eventually be rolled out in the rest of the country, replacing the phone calls Comcast has been using to notify customers to security problems, Opperman said."
So wait, instead of a personal phone call (which they apparently had been doing before anyway), now it'll be a popup just like the 50 other ones the user sees because he or she's infected with malware to begin with?
Nice.
Pardon me if I assume that everything Comcast does is anti-consumer unless proven otherwise. Their record certainly reinforces this skepticism. Sounds to me like they are trying yet again to scare people who torrent or use P2P oftware. Of course since they "can't" throttle, they are coming up with new ways to encourage their paying customers to use less of their "unlimited" bandwidth. Thanks for loking out for us Comcast.
I disagree. Using pop-ups as the notification method will likely trigger a new round of malware attacks that look like official Comcast notifications, complete with helpful links to download scanner and removal tools.
Comcast Gold PCGuard+ Express Pro has detected a significant overnight spike in your network usage that suggests your PC may be infected with a virus. This process has been identified as utorrent.exe. It is recommended that you delete all files related to this program immediately to keep your personal information secure.