Crime? What crime?

Crime? What crime?
Kelly Martin, 2005-09-14

If there's one thing I've learned in the past few years as editor of SecurityFocus, it's that there is absolutely no saving grace in the security world. Everyone is a target, everyone is vulnerable and exposed, and no one is safe from, well... anything.

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-15
stderr

I agree that a good portion of the internet has changed. Those intelligent hackers do still exist, but they're being overshadowed by skiddies and out right criminals who will do anything for the "fun of it" or to make a buck. If you look in the right places you will find pockets of old school hacker...

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Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-15
Oofus Funnybutt III (4 replies)

This article bores me. It's a bunch of whining. I don't like whining. Everyone is *not* vulnerable and exposed. Everyone is *not* a target...only the whiners.

The "I remember using telnet to play nethack" nostalgia is immaterial to the article and sounds very egotistical.

Yes, it could be ...

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Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-15
Anonymous (1 replies)

"why ... do you even need online funds transfer capabilities for an account with your life savings?!?"

Ummm, because maybe you need to transfer some money to checking to pay your power bill? Or would you prefer having some utility company directly pulling the money from your savings account? A ...

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Re: Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-16
Oofus Funnybutt III (1 replies)

Ummmm, she needs online bill pay, not funds transfer. Why would you have your life savings in a checking account anyway? She's practically stealing her own money.

No matter, everyone knows that little old ladies write checks and put stamps on envelopes to leave for the postman....

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Re: Re: Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-16
Anonymous (1 replies)

Online bill pay against a savings account? I don't think so. The idea, last I checked, for having a savings account is so that you can have "liquid" funds which earn interest (not very much nowadays, but better than nothing). You then transfer money in small increments from savings to a checking ...

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-28
Oofus Funnybutt III

I said nothing about a savings account. You went off on a tangent about checking vs. savings but that wasn't the point. There are plenty of investment options with a far better return and security than checking/savings accounts.

I agree we need safer methods of conducting transactions on-line. ...

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Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-16
Anonymous (1 replies)

You are a moron. You missed the point of the article completely. What about personal responosibility and ethics!

People are not lemmings that you can exploit at will and they don't care. People are just like you and I and have a right to be respected. Yes, people do stupid things and don't ta...

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Re: Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-10-01
Oofus Funnybutt III

I'm not a moron, nor do I exploit lemmings. Hell, you can't even finish a level without them. Anyway, people do not have a right to be respected according to me. No one is entitled to my respect, nor do I blindly expect that people should automatically respect me. Respect is something to be earn...

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Re: Thanks mom! ...but... 2005-09-19
stdout

So failing to protect yourself means it's your own fault. Sounds like you're part of the problem......

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times have changed 2005-09-22
Kelly Martin (1 replies)

The NetHack reference isn't egotistical. If I recall correctedly I was telenetting around looking for free NetHack servers simply because I enjoyed playing NetHack games so much. I've never finished the game. The telnet games are just a small example of how open servers were back then.

Nowadays ...

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Re: times have changed 2005-09-26
Oofus Funnybutt III

Hmmm...online kung-fu battles could be interesting if you don't butcher the article with (sentimental) nonsense like this one. You should spend time thinking up better articles and topics instead of playing overrated Rogue rip-off text games.

My opinion aside, you enjoyed nethack so much that..i...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-15
Anonymous (1 replies)

"Would these same people break into their neighbor's home and rob an old lady at gunpoint? Or smash her head in with a sledgehammer?"

Maybe. Just a couple of weeks ago, we were assaulted with very ugly scenes of how a massive hurricane can, at least locally, completely destroy civilization in a ...

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Re: Crime? What crime? 2005-09-29
Anonymous

Destroy civilization? What civilization? You've got a million people living in slums on gov't checkes... Have you seen crime stats from New Orleans from the last few years?...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-15
Anonymous

Great article Kelly. Good way of putting to words what all of us are thinking. ...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-15
Anonymous

"Inside a company of 1,000 employees, it's not uncommon to find just one or two security staff."

I am in a compamy of approx 1,000 people and I am one of 3 IT staff. Yes, our IT dept is a total of three people. Database administration, network administration, application develoment, end user supp...

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Check the chard on The "Badness Gap" 2005-09-15
Anonymous (1 replies)

The inflection point is 1993.

Q: Guess what happened in 1993?

A: Windows 3.1/3.11...

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Re: Check the chard on The "Badness Gap" 2005-09-21
Anonymous (1 replies)

yes, when people started using Windows, that is the point when people were actually able to use their comptuers and get some actual work done.

Or do you think we were really all better off using standalone MS-DOS apps?...

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Re: Re: Check the chard on The "Badness Gap" 2005-09-26
Anonymous

"that is the point when people were actually able to use their comptuers and get some actual work done"

... unlike the prior 15 years, which saw thousands of university students telnetting into random unix machines to play nethack, right? I suppose sending email and reading usenet don't count as...

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Crime of the mind... 2005-09-16
Alexey Vesnin

Welcome to the desert of reality... It's just a question of time, but everyone faces with the sad fact you've mentioned - this world isn't nice, and it's creation - Internet - can't be nice too just by the parenting logic law... Sad, but true. And about smoke brakes - yes, we take 'em. And it's a go...

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One Word 2005-09-17
bud

It all really all just comes down to one word. Money!

If jobs were paying as much to solve these problems as crime does to create them, we would all be fat and happy....

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RE: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security 2005-09-17
Anonymous (1 replies)

exerpt:
"Running a "penetration test" for Apache bugs is completely pointless against a server that is running a custom piece of C code that is running in a locked-down portion of an embedded system"

I'm no expert but isn't advocating securuity thru obscurity and suggesting that we program cust...

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Re: RE: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security 2005-09-21
Marcus Ranum

Security Through Obscurity is when your system's ONLY security is because the holes in it are secret. I.e.: you leave the door unlocked and hope nobody notices. Building your system to resist attack AND denying your attacker useful information is just good strategy. I.e.: you lock the door but don't...

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Security? What Security? 2005-09-19
Anonymous

I wonder what publicly traded companies are doing? Are they paying attention to their security office (if they even have one), or are they simply paying lip service? I bet most CEO's have no idea what their security is lacking, due to inept/incompetent CIO's covering up the real issues....

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Hackers vs Criminals 2005-09-19
Anonymous (2 replies)

This is a great article, but I have one problem with it... It pains me to see the word Hacker constantly associated with digital mayhem (identity theft, spam, virus creation, etc.) By definition a Hacker is essentially a computer/technology enthusiast...not a criminal. I sincerely wish people woul...

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Re: Hackers vs Criminals 2005-09-21
Anonymous

Strangly enough is that the *normal mundane plebs* (speak non techies) managed to form the language and in their simplistic mind only "Hacker == EVIL" exist, they dist. between Cracker (whom we have to grant some skill) or low script-kiddy which just downloads some script and runs it (resulting in t...

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Re: Hackers vs Criminals 2005-09-21
Anonymous

Absolutely. For someone associated with the IT security industry one would have expected the author to know the true meaning of the word hacker....

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Never has been morals... 2005-09-19
Anon Security Researcher (1 replies)

Honestly, the vast majority of guys out there have no morals whatsoever. They talk about "victims", instead of "targets", and they don't care if some old lady is hacked or if it is a terrorist group -- it is all the same to them.

So, the old ladies get hacked... the weakest get hacked. People who...

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Re: Never has been morals... 2005-09-22
Bononymous

Is there someplace a universally-approved list of ideologies, perversions, ways of life that are moral to harm? Please, do post a pointer.

Last time I checked, there were no universal morality, unfortunately. Even no universal criminal codex, either. Better don't mention Neo-Nazis - UN qualifies ...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-20
Anonymous

please use the word cracker, not hacker!...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-20
Network Security Proffesional (3 replies)

The term "Hacker" should not be so losely used in place of the more accurate term of computer criminal.

In the radio world, we have proffesional broadcasters, ham radio operators, and illeagal broadcasting stations, does that make them all radio pirates? The FCC says no.

There are amature loc...

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Re: Crime? What crime? 2005-09-20
Anonymous

"The term "Hacker" should not be so losely used in place of the more accurate term of computer criminal. "

Talk about accuracy. If you murder someone, your a criminal, if you rob a bank, your a criminal, if you wander into your neighbor's house, uninvited, your a criminal. It doesn't matter how...

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Re: Crime? What crime? 2005-09-20
Anonymous

Oh get over it. The term Hacker is now and always will be used loosely. There is nothing anyone can do about it. Just like SPAM is used to describe any unsolicited email regardless of how legitimate it might be. Think about it, how many times have you asked someone to send you an email compared to...

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Re: Crime? What crime? 2005-09-24
Anonymous

You know the term "Hacker" is too losely used nowadays. The term people should be using is "Cracker" or computer criminal. I can't believe that I'm on a website where security professionals post and they don't even use the right terms. We're professoinals, learn to use the right language. ...

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They hurt us twice 2005-09-21
Marcus Ranum (1 replies)

Here's a mind-bender that everyone seems to miss. The bad guys actually cost us TWICE. Not only do they do a tremendous amount of damage to innocent victims, they victimize everyone by forcing us to spend time, money, and effort trying to defend ourselves. So, not only does your system get whacked w...

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Re: They hurt us twice 2005-09-21
Richard Rees

Nope, it's not the bad guys hurting us twice, it's the inventors who never learn. They're the danger. Look at the Monad exposure - Microsoft knew in 1995 that there was a huge potential exposure in adding scripting capabilities to applications (concept macro virus). However, they didn't THINK and...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-21
Pork

Basically, I agree with your opinion...
I would like to quote Kevin Mitnick: "...Maybe we're brought up not to lie to people, but we're not taught computer ethics." (Art of intrusion, p.135)
I think this is very true. People have to realize that rules of the real world apply to the digital world ...

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MacOS X users aren't safe, either! 2005-09-21
Gordon Fecyk

So says your benefactors:

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/19/symantec_threat_rep
ort/>

Enjoy your techno-utopia while it lasts. I can't say you didn't warn us...
...

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Crime? What crime? 2005-09-22
Anonymous

I take issue with the author's assumption of who these people are.

I do not think we are talking about people like you or me hacking "for the fun of it" and stealing money. We are much more likely talking about someone in another country, to whom grandma's purse contains "more" than it does to t...

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