According to Google’s Chief of Anti-Malvertising Team Eric Davis, Internet Service Providers or ISPs are not really doing their best to stop the proliferation of botnet oriented malware which have been affecting web users. Davis believes that ISPs are in a better position to stop the spread of malware since they have access access to computers infected with these botnets on their networks.
In a ZDNet report, Davis was quoted saying:
“The ISPs are in the best position to detected infected machines. They’re in the best place to do something about malware. They already have monitoring systems that could be used to identify signs of malware and botnet activity. If they see abnormally high e-mail activity, that’s most likely spam from a botnet,” Davis said.
Davis couldn’t totally blame the ISPs though for their non proactive approach to dealing with these botnets becase these ISPs have no monetary incentive to help clean infected machines.
Should ISPs heed his advice, Davis has suggested several measures and steps that they can take to fight off these malicious botnets. These include using the Australia Internet Security Initiative as a model for fighting malware, setting up standards that ISPs must meet before granting them access to the Internet, having all computers that connect to the Internet fully-patched and installed with active anti-malware software (powered by Google perhaps?), and restricting those computers which are not in good condition.
Davis also challenged the anti-malware industry to improve their job of scanning SWF content to ensure that such content are free of malicious bugs. Active Flash content has been the hotbed of malware since such pests are more difficult to detect when embedded on a Flash content.
“We should have a clearing house with information on advertisers, agencies. Does their nameserver host match the information on the credit card? Does that match the customer’s contact information? We need to be on top of these things.” Davis said.
