In the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, London - the bunker where Winston Churchill all but ran the UK's second world war operations - cybersecurity specialists summoned by antivirus firm Symantec today explained their views on defeating computer crime ahead of this week's Infosecurity conference in London.
While Charlie McMurdie, the cyberdetective amongst them, gave some fascinating background on the cases her group is fighting - against the likes of Anonymous - I was dismayed at the lack of interest the group showed in what seemed to me to be an important, tangible security measure posited last year.

I refer to the notion of mimicking successful public health inoculation policies (think smallpox eradication) and ensuring that every computer bought in any shop (or online) is protected with a powerful vaccine: modern antivirus software. That way, users would be protected at source from everything from ID-theft-fuelling keyloggers to the bot infections behind megadollar phishing and DDoS attacks. And when ISPs sense a PC is spitting out phishing spam or service-denial packets, they could cut the internet connection until the machine is vaccinated.

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