Why Worm Writers Stay Free

savaget writes "There is an interesting Wired article explaining why worm writers are getting scott free despite their destructive deeds." Nothing really new: overworked law officials, bragging worm writers, you do the math ;) I still find it amazing. The bandwidth wasted by a successful worm is gigantic. To say nothing of time and disk space.

Comments

They aren't terrorists!

[Christianfreak]

"Forget that it may be problematic to extradite the individual, or that they may be young, or claim to be doing 'research.' We need to catch them, and place them in a position whereby they are seen for what they are -- a terrorist," Cooper said. "The cost to our businesses, not to mention our way of life, is simply too high to not pursue these individuals."

This is the sort of thing that really pisses me off. Not to say that virus writers don't do damage or even that they are not criminals but how can you compare a computer glitch to killing 3000+ people? These virus writers are kids with too much time on their hands, they aren't terrorists! The solution isn't to toss them in jail or throw away the key, the solution is to get them to do something useful with their skills and then to use products that don't have so many security problems. </rant>

Re:They aren't terrorists!

[geophile]

Your posting says that virus writers aren't terrorists because what they do doesn't compare to killing 3000+ people. Then your sig compares Bill Gates to Hitler.

Re:They aren't terrorists!

[dillon_rinker]

Terrorism doesn't necessarily imply killing people. The classical terrorist (ie, the one that exists mainly in poli-sci courses) blows up generators, water plants, radio towers, etc in an effort to destroy the public's trust in the government's ability to protect them. Someone who targets civilian infrastructure meets the threshold for being a terrorists. There's obviously a gradation; those who target large numbers of civilians are also terrorists (duh) but that doesn't mean that someone who blows up an empty building isn't a terrorist.

Furthermore, I would argue that you don't need to have political objectives to be classified as a terrorist. If I blew up a generator station because I think it'd be cool to see, I think it would be valid to classify me as a terrorist. This gets kind of tricky, because it'd be easy to categorize an arsonist as a terrorist, or a vandal, but I digress.

Anyway, the obvious analogy is that someone who targets information infrastructure (ie worm writers targeting email servers) is a terrorist. And don't argue that the analogy doesn't hold simply because there's no no permanent damage simply because it can be repaired. That's like arguing pulverizing every cubic inch of a building isn't permanent damage because it can be rebuilt. Don't argue that there's no real costs associated with worm attacks - do you think net admins work for free? (If so, I've got a job for you :) I'll grant that most costs are overrated.

Counterpoint - if blowing up a building is terrorism, why not burning it down? Should arson be considered terrorism? What about insurance fraud - if I burn down my old barn for the insurance money am I a terrorist? What about vandals? There's a continuum of crimes against property, as well as crimes against people; where do we put "terrorism" on that continuum? We must be cautious in verbiage used to define "terrorism"
in the law, lest the crime be placed further down the continuum than we want.

Counter-counter-point - arsonists rarely burn down every building on the internet; worm-writers at the very least have in their minds the idea that they could take out every email server on the internet (basically a DOS attack) or every workstation with the targeted OS(s) by wiping their drives after re-launching.

C

No money in catching them.

[saint10]

A multi-billion dollar industry was created by writers of malware; anti-virus, tripwire, IDSes. Why would any large security company want malware authors to be caught?

*gulp*

[hiryuu]

"We need to catch them, and place them in a position whereby they are seen for what they are -- a terrorist," Cooper said. "The cost to our businesses, not to mention our way of life, is simply too high to not pursue these individuals."

Terrorists? Virus writers are terrorists? Keep it up, boys, and the word will lose all meaning and everyone will be desensitized to what it really means. Sheesh.

Obviously the legal system doesn't see them as such, yet, from the details of the article.

Terrorist no longer means anything...

[Ami Ganguli]

Over the last few months the word "terrorist" has lost all meaning. I also heard the other day that child pornographers were being called terrorists. And of course the Isrealis, Palestinians, and Americans are terrorists, depending on who you ask. I'm sure the people who set fires around Sydney were terrorists too. Nowadays a terrorist is anybody you don't like.

The old definition of terrorist was somebody who used terror as a tool to some political ends. Basically, if you can't defeat your enemy in a head-on attack, you choose an easy target calculated to demoralize the enemy.

It's too bad, because 'terrorist' really was a useful word. Now that it's being used so broadly there's no concise way to talk about 'classic' terrorists.

TERRORrism

[markj02]

Terrorism implies creating terror. I'm sorry, but most people are simply not scared by the prospect of finding a virus attachment in their E-mail: it is both common and easily dealt with.