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Intelligence Start-Up Goes Behind Enemy Lines To Get Ahead of Hackers
anlashok writes: The Times profiles a company called ISight, which sells computer security intelligence gathered by professionals from the "dark web". From the article: "ISight's investors, who have put $60 million into the company so far, believe that its services fill a critical gap in the battle to get ahead of threats. Most security companies, like FireEye, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks and Intel's security unit, focus on blocking or detecting intrusions as they occur or responding to attacks after the fact. ISight goes straight to the enemy. Its analysts — many of them fluent in Russian, Mandarin, Portuguese or 21 other languages — infiltrate the underground, where they watch criminals putting their schemes together and selling their tools."
"Allowing the bad guys to continue operating" you say. You've "allowed" crime just as much as anyone else has. You have just as much right to track down individual criminals and fly around the world trying to stop them as do the researchers working for these companies. We're not cops, we're nerds. You could register in the cracker forums, follow the social media feeds, and try to do what you seem to expect us to do. Why haven't you done it?
The difference between you and I is only that I HAVE contacted the FBI or National Center for Missing and Exploited Children the few times that I've come across a situation that warranted it. What have you done? I warned Wikipedia of an attack that would have taken them down, warned them in time to prevent the attack. What have you done?
99.99% of the time, we don't have the real name and home address of the bad guys. We have screen names, like you see on Slashdot, and we see what types of vulnerabilities and attacks they're talking about this month. Then we protect our clients, which may include your bank, from the types of attacks that are being discussed by the bad guys.
99% of my coworkers don't have any authority to arrest anyone. That's not our job. Our job is secure the systems you rely on. There is one person at the company I work for who used ton have the authority to arrest certain specific criminals. That happens to be me. I successfully found and arrested most of the people I was granted authority to go after. So yeah, we've actually personally put a few criminals behind bars, though that's not our day job. "Allowing criminals to continue operating", eh? I've told you what I've done to stop criminal activity. I ask you again, what have you done? You've done nothing, you have allowed them to continue.