Patent ID: 7461403

Claim:
A system for providing passive screening of transient messages in a distributed computing environment, comprising: a network interface passively monitoring a transient packet stream at a network boundary comprising receiving incoming datagrams structured in compliance with a network protocol layer; a packet receiver reassembling one or more of the incoming datagrams into a segment structured in compliance with a transport protocol layer; an antivirus scanner scanning contents of the reassembled segment for a presence of at least one of a computer virus and malware to identify infected message contents; a protocol-specific module processing each reassembled datagram based on the transport protocol layer employed by the reassembled datagram; and a spoof module sending a spoofed network protocol packet responsive to an occurrence of at least one of an infection and a network attack; wherein the spoofed network protocol packet spoofs an origin server by being utilized to send a legitimate packet to a network domain in place of an infected packet.