What will happen is those people who refuse to secure their networks will
get a bad reputation. For instance, suppose Amazon (or Microsoft, or any
major corporation on the internet) gets infected with a spammy worm. If the
company doesn't move to immediately stop the worm, or if it leaves itself
to infection time and again, then people won't trust mail coming from that
company as much as email coming from a company that takes extra precaution
to ensure that it doesn't get infected with spammy worms.
It's not that simple. The vast majority of worm infections are not from
company-owned machines, but private "home" users. Whether the ISPs
can/should/must filter outgoing mail from their ASDL and broadband users
is not entirely clear. However, assuming they don't filter, and the ISP
gets a "bad reputation" s a result, that reputation will affect a number
of other users of that same ISP, many of which have their virus-protection
in perfect order.
This is the problem that many people seem to be ignoring.
--
Fridrik Skulason Frisk Software International phone: +354-540-7400
Author of F-PROT E-mail: frisk(_at_)f-prot(_dot_)com fax:
+354-540-7401