New cyber health certificate: Microsoft wants to quarantine virus-hit computers

In what could be seen as an admission of failure in the fight against computer viruses, Microsoft has proposed a new cyber health certificate that would prevent computers with viruses from accessing the Internet.
"Most computer security experts believe that a well-resourced and persistent adversary will more often than not be successful in attacking systems," Microsoft Executive Scott Charney said in an official blog posting.
He outlined a new online policy based on public health and virus containment policies in the real world.
Charney advocated placing infected machines in temporary quarantine to prevent them passing on viruses. This would require all computers to have a health certificate that would prevent them from accessing the Internet without a clean bill of health.
"Such health checks should ensure that software patches are applied, a firewall is installed and configured correctly, an antivirus program with current signatures is running, and the machine is not currently infected with known malware," he wrote in the accompanying paper, which he presented at a Berlin conference, International Security Solutions Europe.
"If the problem is more serious (the machine is spewing out malicious packets), or if the user refuses to produce a health certificate in the first instance, other remedies, such as throttling the bandwidth of the potentially infected device, might be appropriate," Charney proposed.