**OT**
Found on RB:
OT: Food for thought:
Net Attacks: Who's to Blame?
By Bud Smith
AltaVista Staff Writer
02/09/00
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Jackals. Hyenas. Junkyard dogs. Dung
beetles. All proof that a creature can be loathsome, repellent, socially unacceptable, even smell bad, yet still perform a useful function.
The hackers who are perpetrating denial-of-service attacks are doing more good than harm. Yes, they should be identified (where possible), arrested, and prosecuted. Yet they're an essential part of the ecology of cyberspace.
Think about it. You're spending an increasing amount of your time and, more than likely, your money online. Yet the Internet is becoming more, not less, vulnerable to attack. Hackers exploit those vulnerabilities -- and in doing so make them embarrassingly obvious and force improvements to be made. The changes that will in the long run make the Internet a safer place for everyone.
Attacks get easier
The current denial-of-service attacks work by taking advantage of "always-on" Internet connections like those made possible by DSL and cable modems to enlist scores of "innocent" computers. As these connections proliferate, the attacks get easier.
Under control of a Net server and, ultimately, a hacker, these computers join in relentlessly pinging an Internet
site, such as Yahoo!, with confusing messages that seem to originate from within the target site itself. In trying to
deal with those messages, the site gets increasingly busy and then becomes unavailable to users.
Who's to blame here? Well, if a highway has a lot of accidents, it gets redesigned -- guardrails get added, speed limits imposed, and soon the fatality rate drops. Similarly, improvements are needed in the Internet in general, and in the way some users' connections are set up in particular, to prevent this specific type of attack.
More broadly, the Internet community needs to put more time, money, and effort into security to anticipate and blunt these kinds of problems.
Finding the weak spots
Hackers are showing us where the weak spots on the information superhighway are. Bringing a major site down for a couple of hours is illegal, wrong, even tacky. But it forces sites to protect themselves against vulnerabilities that otherwise would linger as more and more people, and more and more money, move to the fast-growing online world.
By forcing change, hackers help reduce the Internet's vulnerability to more serious crimes -- blackmail, theft, even attacks that could serve terrorist or military purposes.
So if you know someone participating in these attacks, turn them in; the FBI is waiting for your call. But even as these cyberscum are caught and prosecuted, we should all recognize that they aren't the real problem -- and that, through their actions, they force the Internet world to work harder on solutions.
(Voluntary Disclosure: Position- Long; ST Rating- Strong Buy; LT Rating- Strong Buy)
Steve |
