Content Forensics can help ISPs to identify and clean infected PCs

Managed email and internet content security firm Streamshield, will on Monday release an update to its Content Security Gateway. The feature, called Content Forensics, gives ISPs a way to identify and clean end-user machines infected by Trojans that could enable zombie spam, or distributed denial-of-service, attacks.

Geoff Bennett, Product Marketing Director at Streamshield, said, “[Content Forensics’] one goal in life is to find zombie-infected PCs and deal with them,” He added that this system would help ISPs to reduce their costs and cut customer turnover.

According to Bennett, up to a quarter of a typical ISP’s customers are infected in some way. “Zombie-infected machines are a huge problem for ISPs, and according to our studies are costing ISPs in Europe as much as $170m in excess traffic and customer churn,” he added.

If a machine is identified as a zombie the ISP can help the user to remove the infection from their machine, before it can send out any more malicious code or emails. An infected machine can also be quarantined to stop it sending out emails.

Once a quarantine is in place, the user can still access some parts of the internet, such as Microsoft patch update sites, or the ISP’s own repair and recovery pages so that the tools for removal remain available to them.