Inventor of Proxy Firewall Blames Hackers

An anonymous reader writes "SecurityFocus published an interview with Marcus Ranum, the inventor of the proxy firewall. It's an interesting reading, and the end is even better: Truly, the only people who deserve a complete helping of blame are the hackers. Let's not forget that they're the ones doing this to us. They're the ones who are annoying an entire planet. They're the ones who are costing us billions of dollars a year to secure our systems against them. They're the ones who place their desire for fun ahead of everyone on earth's desire for peace and the right to privacy."

Comments

I agree...

[cheezemonkhai]

How dare a large american mega-corperation that wants to keep our private data on their systems and make money off selling it have to spend any money protecting it.

Yes hackers are a pain in the arse, so are spam merchants. Thats life, live with it.

In other news the inventor of the Yale lock blames thieves for the invention of the lock, which irritates us daily.

Re:its the hackers alright!

[BlogPope]

Problem is, just like the phreakers, while the hackers showed the way, organized crime (and yeah, I think I'll lump CoolWebSearch in that group) has pushed them out. The number of attacks related to real hackers is minimal these days, though there's enough idiots writing the tools thats the equivalent to giving uzis to schoolkids.

Suddenly we're all little piggiesliving in the big bad wolf's neighborhood and we're living in software houses built of twigs.

Re:Someone should patent blame deflection

[FictionPimp]

Yea, but my house was built without doors, just big gaping holes. So how dare you come in and steal my stuff. I can't belive people would be so dishonest.

At least a door is an effort at security. Most software makers make no effort. I can prove this by the large list of programs that require me to make hours of phone calls to find all the stupid places they put stuff so my users do not have to run in admin mode in windows.

Hacker Justification

[Mulletproof]

Now this is just a sad justification and can easily be turned the other way-- If it had been organized crime that started hacking, the governement would probably take it more seriously than it is now, with laws and penalties to match. The tools would have been developed anyway, so it's really a non-issue.

Besides. Hackers have been doing serious damage from day one. Besides just breaking into networks for "curiosity sake" they've been planting worms, trojans, trolling entire credit card data bases, commiting DDoS attacts, etc etc. No, not all of them, but enough to make the OPs point a ridiculous one to even attempt to justify.

Re:"Desire for fun"? Oh please..

[sphealey]

There is this thing out there called Google News. You might want to give it a try:

(IsraelNN.com) The first charges in the "Trojan Horse" mass industrial espionage case, which implicates many of Israel's economic powerhouses, have been filed with a Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court today.

The charges were filed against the private investigator alleged to have obtained sensitive business information from Israeli businesses illegally by means of a Trojan Horse computer program. He then sold the information obtained to the targeted businesses' competitors.

It is in fact not teenagers, but directed industrial espionage at best, international espionage at worst.

sPh