Slashdot Mirror
Cybercrime Is a Franchise Model That Scales
Presto Vivace notes a report from the RSA conference on the cybercrime economy, and it's not an optimistic one. Part of the problem is that in many places cybercrime pays much better than legitimate work, including security research. "As the panelists explained, a single spam message might be tied to as many as 10 separate organizations and perhaps five suppliers. Every task in the criminal economy has become a separate specialty. Some people sell e-mail lists, others sell lists of compromised IP addresses, there are sellers of credit card numbers, and those who sell access to bot nets. Then there are those who handle product fulfillment for spammers, and those who specialize in laundering money."
Its not as hard as you think. If you can get the money off-shore (such as an offshore account in the pacific), and then throw it to a numbered account in a swiss bank, its basically done.
The hard part is getting it out of the country of origin, without it being linked to you as having "left" from you.
Kill all bot nets. Seriously. And have companies who sell operating system take some financial responsibility for future security.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Part of the problem is that in many places cybercrime pays much better than legitimate work, including security research.
Crime almost always "pays better" than so-called legitimate work (is crime really considered a profession?) Well I guess you could say it is a part of the problem, but the OTHER part of the problem is the risk of getting caught is too low. It is a risk/reward model. There are other factors in play here too, for example people's morality. Even if there were little risk and great reward, some people have a moral system that would still prohibit them from undertaking a life of crime.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Part of the problem is that in many places cybercrime pays much better than legitimate work, including security research.
Another part of the problem is that our cyber enforcement budget leans heavily toward pornography, gambling, and copyright.
Yet another part is that corporations and politicians are unwilling to kill their fatted calf that is "legitimate" UCE.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
CASE STUDY: Matt Dillon
My brother own's a bar frequented by Matt Dillion, the mult-millionaire, super-naturally gorgeous, very famous actor. And he's never seen anyone so utterly terrible at picking up girls. Why? Because he's never *had* to be good at chatting up girls, he's been a movie star since he hit puberty. If he'd needed to learn how to chat up girls, he'd have learned.
You're bad at being dishonest for the same reason Matt Dillion is bad at picking up women.
But, if you'd lack any natural ability to achieve goals honestly, you would have had no other option but to develop the talent to lie, cheat and steal your way to success.
This is the same reason why beautiful girls seem dumb, and powerful people rarely have any other talent than gaining power.
To me, this last bit is the most troubling. We've created a world in which utterly worthless people have no other choice than to figure out how to exploit the worth of others in order to get anywhere in life.
Personally, I blame our "won't someone think of the children" policies. They keep dumb people alive long enough to develop the skill to exploit the intelligent people - who are completely unprepared to deal with dishonesty, cheating, and theft because they never needed to do the things that would have given them experience in those areas.
It's like that sig which floats around slashdot a lot: "Never argue with a fool. They'll drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience."