Talk Talk Makes Home Safe With Broadband Blocking Service
Talk Talk is set to allow customers to choose whether or not they want to filter malicious or offensive content from their broadband service via a centralised blocking service called Home Safe.
Talk Talk will become the first large ISP to offer this centralised blocking service to its customers – allowing them to block malicious or offensive material at server level.
The blocking service will also enable parents to stop their children accessing adult content on their computers.
At the moment users have to rely on security software which is installed on a PC in order to protect themselves from infection. The new service has been questioned by experts who wonder if the service will be able to react quickly enough to new threats.
The new Talk Talk service, Home Safe, will run on the central computer system positioned between the web and the individual user’s home connection. It will scan sites users want to use to check whether there are any malicious programs connected to the site. It will also block single alerts on pages which it finds to have malware.
Talk Talk said it doesn’t retain details such as a user’s IP address so it’s not possible to identify individual customers.
It means parents who are concerned that their children are able to access adult material will be able to log on to a web page and set their own content filters enabling some sites to be blocked completely.
Not only will the new Talk Talk service block adult content and filter malicious malware but parents will be able to put a time lock on services such as Facebook, to prevent them being accessed by children when they are supposed to be doing other things such as their homework.
Security experts however have questioned the usefulness of the service. Some question whether the system can protect against malware. E.g. The senior security researcher at Trend Micro, Rik Ferguson, said the “white list” may not work for services such as Facebook. He said “The frequency with which we see rogue apps popping up on Facebook is much greater than one every 24 hours”.
He suggested it would be more useful to scan outbound internet traffic to analyse whether infected PC’s are sending spam or involved in large scale web attacks.