ISP's serving consumers and small business should take on the same role as a corporate network department. At my company insecure protocols are blocked between the 'net and the LAN by the networking department. Egress filtering is in effect. They also block spam by a number of methods. Compromised systems are isolated.

It was a struggle to get to this point, but there is a verifiable ROI. The department has been able to report that many of the last major worms, virii, etc have had no or minimal effect on the company's systems. They used to have to report on their progress of cleaing up.

If anybody doubts the claims they we are not paying for the insecurity of others' systems, just look at your firewall logs. Right now pings are the highest, followed by port 135 probes. I don't have to bother tracing any of these. I know where they are coming from. I don't think it is going to get any better on it's own.

Since I have been demanding that AV and firewalls go on home systems I work on, I have had far fewer return calls to repair malicious code damage. I setup shortcuts to updates. I handout update CD's like candy, and I tell them to pass the CD along when they are done. I'm working on more.

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