Fresh on the heels of the discovery that the new Belkin home routers hijack http sessions every so often comes news that Cisco and the major anti-virus vendors are getting together to put virus detection software on the router. The plan is not only to block viral traffic from the Internet but also to block access to the Internet by those computers that show signs of infection.

Up to now, the router plays a passive role on the network. It read the address part of a data packet and sends it on in the right direction. It does not examine the contents of the packet. The Cisco plan changes all that. A Cisco router will not just redirect a session to a different address, which is what the Belkin router does. It will now examine the contents of the packet and make a determination whether to even send it.

The intention is laudable. Sceptics like me, however, begin to envision this being expanded so that packets are examined not just for viral patterns in the data, but for other conent patterns. Further, if the rules on the router are set a certain way, offending packets are not simply dropped. They are redirected to Somewhere Else so that Someone Else can monitor offending behavior and, presumably, Take Action.