The Home Office funded project, ITSafe, can be found at www.itsafe.gov.uk. It uses information provided by the government’s National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC).
The service will send email alerts to users who sign up, and will provide protection and remediation advise at its web site. No alerts have yet been published, but Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said they will be written for non-technical users.
She said: Signing up to this service will give users an extra level of defense in two key ways; by providing general advice on IT security and issuing official alerts if and when it is felt there is a serious enough threat from a particular virus or other form of threat.
The service looks like it will be similar to the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team’s National Cyber Alert System, which was launched 13 months ago by the Department of Homeland Security.
While both these services are aimed primarily at consumers, in the age of botnet-driven spam and denial-of-service attacks, it is the general consensus that the more endpoints are secured the better it is for the whole internet.
