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FCC Chair Calls On ISPs To Adopt New Security Measures
alphadogg writes "U.S. Internet service providers should take new steps to protect subscribers against cyber attacks, including notifying customers when their computers are compromised, the chairman of the FCC said Wednesday. Julius Genachowski called on ISPs to notify subscribers whose computers are infected with malware and tied to a botnet and to develop a code of conduct to combat botnets. Genachowski also called on ISPs to adopt secure routing standards to protect against Internet Protocol hijacking and to implement DNSSEC, a suite of security tools for the Internet's Domain Name System."
Will torrent clients be classified as malware as well?
a popup in Iceweasel saying "Attention! Your computer is compromised!" then some spiel about IE9 and no antivirus...
oh, wait, now where have I seen this before? (link for information only! Do the clicky on "free scan" links at your own risk!)
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Of course, ISPs' employees have nothing better to do than to notify ~90% of their customers their computers have malware. It boggles my mind the ideas that people come up with (sopa/pipa/acta, logging all connections, etc.) and try to implement about monitoring the Internet with little or no thought to the logistics or funding of their stupid ideas.....
unless they put some of their crappy bloated software on your computer? ISPs ought to be just that. An internet service provider. Give me an internet connection from point A to point B. PERIOD.
I don't need your stinking protection, I've been doing just fine since 1993.
Now excuse me while this strange web site forces my browser to full screen and scans my Linux Box for viruses...
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Back in the late '90s that's how we worked at ISPs. If we notices weird traffic on an account or were getting spam complaints, we'd call up the customer. If we couldn't get a hold of them we would disable the account until they called. Some kid pumping out Make Money Fast emails, we'd call mom and have a chat.
Then all the local ISPs got bought up by telco and cable companies. The price didn't go down, just the service.
I'm glad I'm still on one of the last local Mom&Pop ISPs in the area, when I call support I get a guy that actually has enable to the routers. It costs about $15/month more but I'm willing to pay for the service I get.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Given that most knowledgeable people seem to think it's a bad idea... I have to wonder why government keeps coming up with schemes that essentially require monitoring by the ISP.
I mean, when you consider that as a practical matter, an ISP is (or at least should be) just a common carrier, like a telephone company. In fact the FCC originally -- and even very recently -- wanted to classify ISPs as common carriers. Which would preclude any monitoring. So what's up with all these monitoring ideas?
Are they maybe just trying to get some kind of monitoring in place, so that they can expand it later?
There seem to be a lot of negative comments about this, and perhaps some with subtle good reason. But I really like the idea, if it's implemented as opt-in, and boils down to "if any existing software run by the ISP believes that my computer is running known malware based on known traffic patterns, send mail to either or both of the email address and physicial address I registered during the opt-in process". To me this sounds analagous to the security breach notification laws corporations are subject to in some jurisdictions, and I believe those are generally a good thing as well. Without them, you get the status quo, which is things like Nortel knowing they were compromised for years, and just not caring. I actually think this is likely the status quo at all major organizations. I mean really, do you think if microsoft/google/etc found out that major fractions of their internal infrastructures had been owned by foreign government X for the last 5 years, that without laws they would ever _do anything about it_ if the attackers were friendly enough to just be sucking data about their engineering and customers, and not actually impacting the day to day monetary business? I'm pretty sure what would happen in such a case would be some management screaming at some overworked internal security folks. And then the internal security folks would either brush the problem under the rug, or get fired when they explained exactly how many resources it would take to remotely adequetely stop the espionage threat from government X. Bottom line- forcing by law companies to notify their customers when existing software discovers exploits seems like a really good idea to me. Yes, there will be some resulting pressure to just turn off their internal checks, but honestly, that doesn't bother me at all if when those internal checks were finding things, they weren't going to bother telling the customers anyway. In fact, my optimistic hope, which I think is quite reasonable, is that when the actual scope of these things is forced into the public view, that the horrendous security practices responsible, will actually get remedied in the right ways. I truly don't get why there is so much resistence here to this idea- fundamentally (as I described above, i.e. not mandating new software be run, but just that if existing software already running thinks a customer is owned by hackers, that they take the trouble of notifying the customer.
Having worked for multiple ISPs I can absolutely guarantee this will not happen.
1. Most importantly: Figuring out who is infected is a huge amount of work. We'd need to scope out millions of dollars in project work to design a system to detect who has a problem, processes for creating tickets for people to notify them, hire people to do all of this work, then maintain this entire elaborate system every time we make a change to our network, our repair structure, etc... Even if the government funded a system, every ISP's internal structure is totally different. It would never work for more than 1. They'd have to fund every ISPs program individually, and the ISPs would suck up that funding like vampires and have little to show for it in the end.
2. To notify the customer automatically you'd need to either A: send them an email, which about 98% of your customers don't use the email address you gave them or B: Redirect them via your DNS server to a warning page. But if they aren't using your DNS that's not going to work, and the people writing the malware/bots will figure that out and either block your warning page, or more simply change the customers DNS server to googles or something and your entire system is useless.
3. When we do notify these people what is the very first thing they are going to do? Call the ISP. What is a virus? How did they get it? When are we going to fix it for them? Well they got it on our internet, they never had viruses when they had dialup... It's an hour long call at least. That just cost the ISP $20 and the customer is going to hang up and do nothing.
4. It's of absolutely no benefit to the ISP to do anything like this. So what if the customers are infected? They have the internet, malware doesn't hurt the ISPs network unless the ISP itself is the target witch is rarely the case. Even if one of the ISPs customers is the target they just adjust a few routers and the problem goes away. The customer is blissfully unaware of their problem and paying their bill. You don't mess with that. And yes, customers really are stupid enough to think the malware they have had for years and didn't know about, but were suddenly notified of when they signed up for your service, came from you.
5. Almost every ISP in the united states sells some sort of malware/antivirus package now. You're asking them to subvert their own product. Good luck getting that past product development.
And lastly, I want to re-iterate... the customer will DO NOTHING. They already know they have malware. Their computer runs like shit. They have habits that lead to them having malware. They bought their computer 10 years ago, their way of "fixing" it is using the Dell system restore disk that game with it that reverts it to the original unpatched version of XP. Then they install the pirated versions of autocad and photoshop they got from their brother-in-law 6 years ago, they sure are glad they kept all those CDs he burned... Then they go to bed, their teenage son gets up and surfs porn with IE6 from that fresh XP install, for a couple of hours. He erases the history... his tracks are covered.
The FCC is currently mismanaging radio spectrum sales and partitioning. That is their primary function. Do that and once you're doing your ACTUAL job then worry about the internet which you in fact have no authority over.
The FCC seems to be trying to fail up. TV viewership is dying so they're trying to expand themselves into the internet. I get it. But first maybe they should sell off that radio spectrum and do their actual jobs.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I got a robocall from Comcast a few months back advising me of an infected machine connected to my network. Sure enough, my parents' computer had a bunch of trojans on it that would probably have stuck around for a couple more weeks had they not called me.
404 Not Found
Actually I've seen this in action and all that happens in reality is the ISPs use this as an excuse to toss any customers that actually use the bandwidth they paid for. Both the local DSL and WISP providers will just say "You must have a virus" and turn off your connection if they decide they don't like what you are running or how much you are using, the WISP going so far as to say "You can't run our scanner so you must be infected" when i was running PCLOS on my laptop.
Remember folks the ONLY customers these ISPs really want is what they call the "granny" customers, where all they do is check email and then log off like its 1994. This is because none of the major ISPs are rolling out shit for bandwidth upgrades, instead just sticking those profits in their pocket. Any excuse that lets them toss more people that actually use resources is quickly jumped on and this way they can say "We are protecting the network" instead of "he actually used HALF the bandwidth that is in his contract, can you fucking believe it?" and gives them a nice legally sound out even when the customer isn't hitting the caps, just using close to it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.