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 with a trojan, every computer user on earth who cares about security has to buy an antivirus package. You cannot directly blame an individual attacker for the expense of defense, but collectively the computer-using world pays billions of dollars for firewalls, IDS, Antivirus, etc - as an indirect result of the moral choices of hackers. This is why I've never accepted the idea floated by some "security researchers" that they bear no responsibility regarding the vulnerabilies and techniques they publish. It's patent nonsense when you consider that a chunk of the world's population will have to pay good money to prepare to defend against them.

Computer security is a $5+billion/year industry. I'd rather spend that money on beer, but thanks to all the hackers out there I've got to waste my share trying to keep them off my systems.

mjr.

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/355/32412#32412