Intrusion detection systems are used to identify suspicious network traffic. However, a high percentage of alerts generated by such systems are liable to be false positives. Since these alerts typically require manual intervention from a network administrator, false positives create considerable administrative overheads. In order to reduce the number of false positives, we propose a new network protection component called a network quarantine channel, which is used to perform some additional interaction with hosts that have been identified as the source of suspicious traffic. The network quarantine channel is used to provide a more accurate assessment of the threat posed by a suspicious host, before alerting the network administrator.