SleepyEgg

Once upon a time, users who were careless about security posed a risk only to themselves. But, with the advent of pervasive networking and botnets, that's no longer true. As a result, lax security has become the equivalent of second hand smoke: it poses a risk to everyone, and needs a security equivalent of a public health campaign and quarantines. That's the message of a new report by Scott Charney, who heads Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. And Charney has a simple solution: a digital health report that every piece of network hardware would be required to provide before having access to the full suite of Internet services.

Charney's report is entitled "Collective Defense: Applying Public Health Models to the Internet," and is available for download. In a blog post in which he announced its release, Charney presents this as part of a larger attempt to redefine how we look at cyberthreats, and references an earlier report he prepared. Don't believe him; the two reports are largely unrelated, and the earlier one did little more than present a list of reasons why cybersecurity is so challenging for governments, businesses, and private citizens.