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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.
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?
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.
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.
:) I'll grant that most costs are overrated.
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
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