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US Shows Interest In Zombie Quarantine Code
bennyboy64 writes "Barack Obama's cyber-security coordinator has shown interest in an e-security code of practice developed in Australia that aims to quarantine Internet users infected by malware, also known as zombie computers. He reportedly said it would be a useful role model for the US to adopt. One suggestion within the code is to put infected users into a 'walled garden,' which limits Internet access to prevent further security problems until quarantined. Another is to throttle the speed of an infected users' Internet connection until their computer fixed. The code is also being considered by other Asia-Pacific countries, ZDNet reports."
I like this idea in principle, but concerned about the details. The article says it's "formalising an existing code of practice" so perhaps Australians here can let us know how it currently works?
I'm thinking mostly about false positives - I've had a Mac identified as running some Windows virus, at the time I presumed due to NAT somewhere at the ISP level. Getting that sorted out was a matter of waiting half an hour or so, but I can imagine that becoming a more serious issue if this is 'by law'.
The other thing worrying would be forced steps to remove things. I could go with an "ensure you're clean rule", but would be against a "ensure you're running this particular security measure" rule.
Cheers,
Ian
Some are forgetting the obvious that this would require the monitoring of traffic.
I'm guessing that the new paradigm the government is following in regard to the internet is total information control. It started with total information awareness. The original goal was to monitor all the information on the internet to see and prevent terrorism. Most of us agreed with that idea, and now that the internet is fully monitored the next step is to gain complete control over it. This way if a powerful person doesn't like what is being said on a specific website or by a specific computer, they can quarantine it. This word "quarantine" gives an indication about how the government sees unfavorable information. They see it as a "virus", or "mind virus", which is otherwise known as a meme. The only way to stop the spread of a meme is by quarantining it.
Once again this is about information control, not security. If it's about stopping zombie infectious malware as the article claims they could use many technical solutions to do this and put the control in the hands of the user. The user could set up their system to handle it and the government has no reason to get involved. Or the government could promote corporations such as Google to develop an improved version of Linux or the Linux kernel to have a feature to allow this much in the same way the NSA developed SELinux. To make it a political issue and to use Australia of all places as the example is exactly the wrong way to go about it. We all know that Australia has a completely censored internet with a list of sites people cannot go to because the government does not like the information on these sites.
This might fool individuals who don't understand technology. Saying it's to secure the internet while you throttle their broadband speed might make sense to the 16 year old kid downloading mp3s or using bit torrent. It might make sense to the adult who works in an unrelated industry with little to no knowledge about network neutrality or what is at stake when internet speeds and information is regulated in a centralized manner. To individuals who understand the technology and how to use the internet the idea of controlling the information flowing through the pipes defeats the purpose of the internet itself. I cannot imagine any programmer, hacker, script kiddie, gamer, or serious user supporting this idea. Most of us would rather risk being infected by malware than have our broadband speed throttled.
And let's be honest, child pornography is probably the worst kind of virus you can be infected with. And the only reason it's so horrible is because the laws related to possession of it are unreasonable. So before we go and fundamentally try to alter the code of the internet and create millions of unintended consequences we should debate what we want the internet to be and what it's purpose is. Does the internet exist as a weapon of war or is it something more fundamental? Should the government control the internet or should the market control the internet?
If the government wants to have this much control over it, maybe they should make it free. That's my opinion. But to bait and switch like this is unfair to individuals who have paid for internet access for over a decade, who have created most of the content on the WWW, who have made the internet what it is.
In contrasting this with the president's ability to declare a cyber attack and disable internet access in the United States, I'd say this seems like a reasoned approach that would hopefully be considered an alternative to the former where applicable.
My only real concern is that of privacy. How exactly do they go about telling you're a zombie? Well written malware isn't exactly going to advertise infection, and even hosts which may be participating in a denial of service attack can't definitively be proven to be infected unless they're obvious (like sending a TCP packet with an invalid combination of flags, for instance). Scarier would be using the 'zombie' excuse to monitor net traffic on a connection for 'investigative' purposes. So it may just turn out pointless or it may be a ruse for a different kind of control. Anyone have any articles as to the effects of this or some cases where it was actually used in AU?
It's not reasonable for the government to do anything more than monitor the internet. To start telling people how to run their nodes, what websites they can and can't visit, how they can or can't surf the web and at what speeds, is authoritarianism on the web. The internet was not designed for authoritarianism, it was designed to be an anti-authoritarian technology, it was designed to be decentralized, it was designed in this way because authoritarian centralized systems usually have a single point of failure. These overly centralized systems are more likely to fall or collapse.
The internet as it is designed now is already more advanced than the design of most other systems. To centralize and control it down to the byte flowing through each wire, inspecting every package, analyzing every bit, and controlling which bits to quarantine and which bits not, is just a stealth mechanism which can be used either to destroy the internet or weaponize it. This along with the new behavioral advertising schemes allows for specific centralized entities to feed specific information to specific computers, and now they want to be able to quarantine specific computers to block them from receiving specific information from other computers.
How can this be good for the internet as a whole? How can this be good for the flow of information from a mathematics/physics point of view? How can it be ethical if the objective is to reduce ignorance and preserve freedom of speech? It can only be ethical if the objective is to control, weaponize, and win at any cost.
This Headline wrote a check that the story couldn't cash. Bad editors, no cookie.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
So if you run bit torrent and they decide it's malware, now they can throttle your internet speed and quarantine you. Or if you download legal but tasteless pornography this could be determined to be malware and your speed can be throttled.
This idea is as bad as the kill switch idea.
It's not reasonable for the government to do anything more than monitor the internet. To start telling people how to run their nodes
In a competitive world, businesses WILL NOT prepare for disaster unless the executives see that it affects the stock price. Preparing for disaster is expensive, and it seldom pays off. (see also: car industry, banking industry, airlines, BP, failure to protect against natural disasters...)
If we want the internet to keep running, without collapsing during a cyberwar, then we do need to insist on some things. It's like requiring that banks keep some reserve, requiring that oil companies have a means to stop a leak, or requiring that an airline not skimp on maintenance when the competition gets fierce.
"I would like to see compromised PCs neutered or otherwise stopped. I would like my rights and freedoms not to be tampered with"
You do not have the right to shit in my yard.
And that's what the botnets do. They shit in *everyone's* yard.
--
BMO
Take off the tinfoil.
This should have been done years ago when the botnets really started going full bore.
You think you're the sole victim if you're running an infected machine? You're not. I have no sympathy at all. Getting ISPs to boot compromised machines has been impossible when done from the private sector. I know. I've tried. You know how many machines I know that I've gotten shut down?
One. That's right, one machine, and that took writing email personally to someone higher in the chain of command than the help desk.
ISPs don't want to quarantine customers. Customers give them money. Whether they are good neighbors or not doesn't matter. What it says in the TOS doesn't matter. All that does is simply cover the ISP's butt legally if the ISP has a case of elbow syndrome.
This is not installing secret software on your computer to send out to the Three Letter Agencies to spy on you and take away your rights. This is so people can be stopped from being bad neitzens. Your computer is part of a botnet that is blackmailing a .com or attacking a .gov site like the IRS? Sorry, but you're disconnected until it's cleaned up.
So don't give me your "help help I'm being repressed" BS.
If you're going to shit on my lawn, I'm going to call a cop.
--
BMO
Is it just me, or is the first onslaught of posts unusually full of people who seem to want to judge government first and read/think later? I mean, beyond the usual level here.
The problem occurs when it becomes a government mandate.
Like most things, education is often better than propaganda or legislation. Let's face it, spam email is (primarily) a nuisance, and not much more, and it primarily affects people who have done something to initiate spam email (like sign up to a Yahoo or Google email account). It is better for most people to receive a half hour of education, telling them not to open email attachments from unknown people and to turn off Web-browser abilities, including scripting functions in their email clients than to control them.
You said,
...read/think later? I mean, beyond the usual level here.
Many people have called me stupid. Mostly Right-Wing people, religious people, and people who believe in "UFOs". I guess I can't change my genetics.
We are well over 50% of the internet's capacity being used to send people junk mail, most of it both offensive and fraudulent, far too much of it containing executable payloads that harm the internet itself, etc.
Guess what? I WILL EDUCATE YOU! ISPs do block known spam outlets. ISPs do already cut off Internet users who are known (or highly suspected) of having viruses. Again, this is about government mandates and not about ISPs being responsible or irresponsible.
If the ISPs don't take voluntary action at a level of minimum intrusion, some excited parents' group is going to hold a referendum and hand their government the right to intrude in every living room.
Here's where you sound like a shill for the Internet control lobbyists. ISPs need to have a ZERO level of INTRUSION to run an ISP responsibly. If they get complaints or see HUGE amounts of data going through their servers on email ports (of their non-business customer accounts) then they will investigate or be black-holed from the Internet (just like at one time China was once blacklisted because it had so many malicious things coming out of the country). I've even heard that some ISPs banned Yahoo email, because ANYBODY could sign up for a free email account, and they often did, to abuse the system. Nothing new needs to be done here.
Sure, this proposal goes too far in places, misses the boat technically in others. It's not perfect. But it's better than legalizing deep inspection to be adminitered and performed by the agency of the UN/international courts.
What do you think this whole business is about? This whole security FUD business is about legitimated (the arguments) of deep-packet-inspection, among other things.
If we want better than this, we need to come up with counter-proposals of our own, get out, educate people. (And get ourselves off the OS that is the primary medium of abuse.)
I sense a Flamebait here. You should take your own advice and think before posting.
Well, for me, since...
It's been 1 hour, 33 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I've noticed that your thoughtless and uneducated comments have been up-moderated to +5 Insightful. YOU are obviously a part of the status quo and have nothing to worry about. So there is no need to preach, because normal people think the exact same way as YOU. You can be happy in the knowledge that most people believe in your idea that ISPs should have "a level of minimum intrusion" to violate their customers privacy.
MODERATORS:
Feel free to moderate me Flamebait, because I would never have the arrogance to say something as popular and status quo as the parent:
Is it just me, or is the first onslaught of posts unusually full of people who seem to want to judge government first and read/think late
You make the laws according to the constitution. If it is important enough then people can break the rules and take the legal consequences. If you need to torture a terrorist, spy on someone, then break the law and do so. If you get the information you need great. You probably won't get a jury to convict. If you don't then you do the time. If you are not prepared to do that then what you did probably was not necessary. This only works when there is transparency and accountability. I think that once upon a time in England the hangman faced a court the next day but this may be just a legend. But that is the way it needs to work.
I don't mind if traffic is monitored. I mind if the contents of the traffic is monitored.
The bottom line is that these oligarchs want total control over information, they're threatened by the openness of the internet, the ability for people to bypass mainstream media outlets, the ability for people to share news and information worldwide without censorship or government/corporations (almost the same thing now in the US) putting everything into their own context, the dislike the ability for people to organize.....One way or they other they are going to try to destroy all that is good about the internet.
Malware is a problem, and people who don't patch or have proper security are stupid, but he model we have, where everyone takes responsibility for their own systems works fine, despite the rhetoric, and giving the corporate/government empire more control for any reason is a bad, bad idea.
I think you misunderstand. I have never had a compromised machine. Not once in the 25+ years I've owned machines.
What I am concerned about is what is required to support such actions. In order to support a law that requires machines get cut off the net perhaps only an IP address would need to be listed and issue to an ISP. What if that IP address was spoofed? What if something had changed? What if that IP address was hosted by a wireless network that was either compromised or on the network of someone trying to diagnose a problem before it was realized that it was infected? There are too many ways something could be mistaken in that regard. And what of the requirements for "proof"? Does the ISP receive more than the request or will complete forensic details be presented to the ISP? Will the user(s) ever see the complaint?
I do have some personal experience with how government actions can be made too easily and in error at the same time. I was once about to have my pay garnished for child support by the State of California while I was living in Texas. There was something wrong with that though... *I* had the children, not the mother! She filed false reports to welfare agencies. So based on those false reports, she collected money and my pay was to have my pay garnished? And what proof was offered? None! Just a letter ordering the State of Texas to do so. And while I insisted that I had the children with me, Texas wouldn't stop the action. I asked them to check the local school where I had them enrolled. They didn't want to bother. I ended up pulling them out of school with a copy of their enrolment and attendance records in hand and brought the children to the office in Texas personally as PROOF that I have the children with me and that the garnishment order was in error. In the end my pay was not garnished but it did require the loss of a day's pay to prevent it.
So in summary, this story shows that false reports/data/information can be part of a government order for some action and that report may have little or no proof supporting it. But the victim of such mistakes, the falsely accused, may have to go through ALL MANNER of trouble to prove they were innocent or otherwise not responsible.
Take for example that in my home, I run mostly Linux with occasional Mac OSX usage and an occasional Windows guest. If something were to happen resulting in my network getting limited in some way, what would be required of me to have it restored? Will the asshats at the government agency be required to inspect my home network and its inventory?! Will they understand that I run Linux or what to do with it?
I think you are not thinking this through. This is not fear of the unknown. I know quite personally how government can be when it comes to applying process and procedures for laws like these. I used the DMCA example because there is a fairly low cost of starting a claim under the DMCA and little if no evidence it required in making a claim. What's more, there are no punitive actions required in the event of a false claim. Meanwhile, the person who was claimed against suffers down time, emotional stress from dealing with the false claim and required to do a lot of work in order to restore things once removed. The burden is too often placed on the victim under laws like the DMCA.