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That urgent notice you receive from your cable company may not be related to an overdue bill. Cable giant Comcast announced this week that it has rolled out a new service initially in the Denver market which can detect if a customer’s PC has been infected by malware.
If it does detect a likely infection, Comcast sends an in-browser notice to the customer advising them to visit the company’s anti-virus center, where, hopefully, the virus, bot, or malware can be cleaned up.
The Comcast Constant Guard service essentially looks for computers that are misbehaving. For example, it looks for spikes in traffic being sent from a particular IP address, which could signal that the computer has been taken over by a bot. The service will also send notices to customers when their IP address is identified as a source of spam on an industry spam list.
In a blog highlighting the launch of the service, Jay Opperman, Comcast’s senior director of security and privacy, notes that Constant Guard represents several years of research to protect customers from increasingly sophisticated online security threats. He said it consists of three key components:
* People. Comcast has established a dedicated Customer Security Assurance team to proactively contact customers to deal with issues such as bots, spam, or infected PCs.
* Technology. Comcast is providing customers with free access to antivirus software from McAfee, including its Internet Security Suite. They can also install the Comcast Toolbar which includes spyware detection, popup blocker and anti-phishing software.
* Education. Comcast has created a security channel on its Web site to serve as a resource for all things security related.
It seems like a pretty innovative offering for what has increasingly become a source of stress for the average Internet user. According to Javelin Strategy and Research, there were more than 10 million victims of identity theft in the U.S. last year and many of those thefts were made possible through the use of bots.
Comcast says it has 15.3 million high-speed Internet customers.
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