Wall it off, make it go away

Thu Sep 25 19:36:28 UTC 2008

So, wll you be turning off your firewall and removing your router
passwords first to be the test case?

On 9/25/08, michael.dillon at bt.com <michael.dillon at bt.com> wrote:
>> let's push this stuff back into the nation-states who sponsor
>> it and then use treaties to wall it off inside those places.
>
> Let's not mince words. You want to wall off the Chinese and Russian
> Internets because you believe that the reason so much cybercrime
> originates there is for political reasons (state sponsorship) rather
> than economic ones. Have you ever visited these countries (Moscow
> and Beijing don't count) and seen how people live? There is a much
> larger economic incentive than you can imagine. Using the exchange
> rate figures from xe.com does not tell you how valuable an American
> dollar is in those countries. You need to spend enough time in the
> country to see how it costs to ride a bus, buy your lunch, etc.
>
> In fact, cybercrime originates abroad because the economic incentive
> is so great in those countries, and their level of technical education
> is high enough that they can actually build the distributed software
> systems that they need to drive the flow of hard cash.
>
> Fiddling with router configs, or mail server configs, does not change
> this. In fact, the economic incentive for a NANOG reader to block the
> bad stuff is probably a lot lower than for the foreign bad guy to evade
> your blocks. He will just route around your efforts.
>
> Economic and legal problems should be fixed in the economic and legal
> system, not in network operations. People on this list would do more
> good by supporting legal and economic efforts to fix the problem than
> by tweaking their routers. Or by simply ignoring the problem because
> it is a lot easier for law enforcement to hit a standing target.
>
> In any case, I don't believe that nation states sponsor cybercrime. Bad
> guys
> are found in every country and they will always act for their own
> benefit
> regardless of what laws or treaties may be put in place. Over the past
> 15 years, it has been shown that network vigilantism does not work. If
> anything,
> this just makes cybercriminals stronger by forcing them to evolve their
> systems, and by weeding out the less intelligent ones.
>
> --Michael Dillon
>
>

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