Are ISPs finally fighting the botnets?
Zombie PCs and bot nets
Internet service providers can play a crucial role in detection and removal of spyware. However, so far they have not step up to take further responsibilities in the battle against botnets. This may be about to change as Comcast announced a dedicated customer security assurance team.
So, what’s the danger?
There are many malign consequences of having malware in your computer. One of them is that if your computer is infected by spyware, it can be used by hackers as a proxy (aka zombie computer). Botnets are groups of these zombie PCs (more details in Wikipedia). They can be used for many purposes but mostly to send spam emails but they could also perform much more destructive actions such as stealing your personal data.
What can the ISP do?
ISPs are uniquely positioned to identify these Botnets. ISPs can look at spikes in network traffic from particular PCs. They can also check which IP addresses are involved in that network traffic. In that way they can differentiate between somebody just using all their bandwidth to download movies from a computer sending many emails to many different addresses. Comcast approach is to show a pop ups in PCs with these symptoms and direct them to their Constant Guard site for remedial actions.
How Techie Now can help?
Comcast is providing a great service and we recommend you take advantage of it if you can. However, there are still good reasons to come to Techie Now for further help:
- Do you have time to be checking for malware, viruses, etc, yourself? – if you don’t then we’re glad to save your time.
- Maybe you’re not part of Comcast – we’re happy to help you regardless of who is your Internet provider
- Comcast provides their users with an antivirus. However, antivirus are not always that effective. There are some of them which need an expert to manually remove them.
- Maybe you’ve tried everything and you still have a slow PC or viruses… come to us, not only we like those challenges, we’re successful at them and have incredible prices!