Internet Security: Where Do We Stand

buxton writes "The Economist is running an interesting story which overviews the current global situation on internet security in hackers, terrorism, worms & virii, Microsoft's 'monoculture', and a bunch of other interesting points. Some nice suggestions made by big names in the software industry have been included, such as creating more easily traceable methods of people (i.e. trying to eliminate online anonimity) as a method of preventing hackers. One suggestion which I thought was partictularly interesting involved a bounty system whereby a price would be put on 'hacker's heads', incentivating other hackers to go after them and bring them forward."

Comments

Re:How about we encourage people to use IPTables?

[mental_telepathy]

Good call. Hey grandma, just type IPTables -t INPUT --dport 80 -j DENY at the command line. Me, I'm getting my family to buy macs. Regardless if you think they are more secure because of OS or more secure because of being a smaller target, right now they are more secure, and you get click-button firewalling.

I believe there is an answer

[heironymouscoward]

And people are starting to understand it.

The Internet is not a planned system. It grows and connects like a natural system obeying laws such as Zipf's Law.

When it comes to security, the best model for what is going on in the Internet is also an organic model, namely the naturally occuring phenomenon of parasites, and the way these evolve in any real or simulated ecology.

I've gone into boring detail in my journal.

My opinion is that until we use natural models, and learn from them, we will not be able to stop the rising tide of parasitical code that infests the Internet.

"Monocultures" are a large part of the problem, and the Economist rightly argues that opening the Windows source code to third parties would create more variety and thus more security. But I think we have to go much further, towards systems that actively evolve to protect themselves against parasites.

I've been criticised for saying this by people who say "it's just a metaphor, it does not mean anything". This is untrue: it is a model, one that we can use to understand what the heck is going on: what are the dynamics behind the process, what are the weaknesses of today's infrastructure, and what are the best solutions.

Let me summarize this one more time: The internet behaves like an ecology, obeys the same laws as natural ecologies, falls prey to the same problems as natural ecologies, and if we want to create structures that survive these problems, we must understand things in terms of an ecology, not a planned design.

Re:Anonimity necessary

[RLiegh]

It has been a huge boon for political activists in countries with "overbearing" governments, for whistleblowers in all nations, and for all sorts of other reasons.

Are you so niave as to not realise that in our increasingly totalitarian world, these are all detriments.

How do you think John Ashcroft feels about people who percieve the US as having an "overbearing government" being able to speak out anonymously and with impunity?

Hasn't he gone on record about his views on that?

And as far as whistle-blowers go; no corporation considers whistle blowing to be a Good Thing, and therefore if they were presented with that angle of online anonymity they would probably pony up Even More Money to fight it.

So, in short, the reasons you cite are the reasons why online anonymity is now a thing of the past.