The director of counterthreat unit (CTU? Ugh) for SecureWorks wants to see criminal hacker gangs hunted down. He made his assertions about handling “cyber”crime during the RSA conference this week.
From Computer World:
“We need a new approach to fighting cybercrime,” said Joe Stewart, director of SecureWorks Inc.’s counterthreat unit. “What we’re doing now is not making a significant dent.”
Rather than pursue malware makers the old-fashioned way — a tack Stewart argued is haphazard, at best — he said that teams of paid security researchers should be created to stalk and disrupt specific criminal gangs or botnets. Set up like a police department’s major crimes unit or a military special operations team, the researchers would take a long-term view, get to know their target, perhaps even infiltrate the group responsible for the botnet and employ a spectrum of disruptive tactics.
While this may sound all well and good it raises a question. Where is the money going to come from? It may seem overly simplistic but, the police are out gunned on a massive scale in this respect.
Again, CTU? /me shakes head.
😉
For the full article read on.
[tags]#RSAC, Hacker, Computer Crime[/tags]
Gov’t agencies don’t do some of this already?
And does Stewart have a strategy for dealing with international hackers? Or any collateral damage that may occur in pursuing and keeping down such miscreants?
Or is this all meant to be vigilante-ish? At what point are you attacking a perceived hacker while he’s doing nothing wrong, with the purpose of this strange long-term campaign?
I also caught a big whiff near the end of the article that smelled like the MPAA employing ‘experts’ to poison and track torrent trackers and pirates. That certainly goes over well…
Maybe this can be a decent idea, but I really think dotcom companies trying to shake up business by challenging concepts that have driven security and law enforcement worldwide for decades might not be the best tact. Yes, the cyberworld is different, but there are overarching concepts that should be similar. I can go steal a car from my parking lot right now if I wanted to and the police are not going to stop me, but how easily will I be able to ditch it? Do I know any fences? No…
And why pay researchers to do something you can bribe confidential informants to do when they get caught and don’t want to go to jail? Become our asset and we’ll cut a deal…
They do need to keep an eye on hacker groups regardless, you don’t think other countries can drop their spies right in our own backyard to help attack? I agree, defending against international hackers is very important but we should not ignore the fact that these international hackers could be here hacking our own networks.
We do need to find a way to implement and try to partner with hacker groups at times especially in times when other countries are trying to carrying out coordinated attacks against us because of their hurt pride or some other stupid reason like a baby that gets his toy taken away from him.
I think pretty much everyone who assisted the prosecution of the Pirate Bay has been DOSed off the face of the net, at least temporarily. While it’s all well and good to say “We’re going to pick a fight with those no good nasty hacker groups,” they had better have their ducks in a row before they begin. I wouldn’t take a knife to a gun fight, and I wouldn’t declare war on “cyber criminals” before having a plan in place. These same guys aren’t going to like it when they poke a bot net and get flooded offline for a month.