Comcast tries pop-up alerts to warn of infections

Comcast Corp. wants to enlist its customers in a fight against a huge problem for internet providers, reports the Associated Press — the armies of infected personal computers, known as "botnets," that suck up bandwidth by sending spam and facilitating cyber crime. The country’s largest provider of high-speed internet to homes started testing a service this week in Denver in which Comcast sends customers a pop-up message in their web browsers if their computers seem to have been co-opted by a botnet. The message points to a Comcast site with tips for cleaning infected computers. Comcast said users can close the warning banners if they wish, but they cannot opt out of receiving them. A reminder will return every seven days while a computer appears to be infected. The program, which Comcast hopes to roll out nationally, is one of the most aggressive moves yet by a major Internet provider to curb what’s become a scourge on the internet. Comcast will try to detect a PC’s role in a botnet by studying how much data the machine is downloading and receiving. But the move could be risky, especially if Comcast’s program gets people to trust and respond to pop-up ads–which are often a vehicle for delivering the very viruses that land an infected computer in a botnet…

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