--On Tuesday, June 15, 2004 7:26 +1000 Matthew Sullivan <matthew@sorbs.net> wrote:
Smith, Donald wrote:
First are the consumers willing to pay for a "safer" internet DSL/dial/isdn?
Why should they have to?
Because providing it costs more.
I believe if they were there would be a safer service available. I have seen several "secure" isp's fail in the last few years. If you have any data that shows that there is a market for a more secure dialup/DSL/isdn... please share it.
No, but it won't belong before you will find half a dozen reasons why as an ISP you will want to do it - but then it may be too late.
Such as?
2nd blaming infected machines on the internet is similar to blaming your postal carrier for bringing you junk mail and bills.
Crap
It's not crap. Infected machines are no more the fault of the internet than junkmail in your mailbox is the fault of the post office. There's literally no difference to the model. The post office delivers mail that is addressed to you. They don't care if it's junk mail or not. They deliver it.
About 1/2 of all of the large "infection" events on the internet are the result of people running unpatched unsecured applications on their machines. The other half of the infections I see are due to an end user opening an email and running an attachment.
Correct
Actually, I suspect it's a much larger fraction, more along the lines of 80 to 90%, possibly more.
Even with a secure OS this simple method of infection will continue to work.
Correct
And how is an ISP supposed to do anything about this?
However you are ignoring the fact that once the machine is infected, the machine can be used by hundreds of people (skript kiddies) to damage other parts of the internet, further they can (and are) being used by organised crime to extort money out of large financial institutions and companies, and that's not to mention DDoS's on the smaller people who are just in the way.
Right... So, you should be working really hard to get people not to allow their machines to be infected, and, to get ISPs to disconnect infected sites from the network. I support both of those moves. The rest is just a way to tax the clueful for the ignorance of the masses with little benefit.
How and when did it become the responsibility of the ISP to protect the end users machines?
It hasn't, however the data coming from an ISPs network has always been the responsibility of the ISP.... and I would suggest if you cannot stop the endusers getting infected, then you should look at stopping those machines from abusing other machines on the internet.... If you will not do that you should not be peered.
Sorry... The data ORIGINATING from the ISPs network is the responsibility of the ISP. The data transiting the ISPs network is just that. The ISP has no obligation, indeed, no right to look into the data beyond what is necessary for delivery and operation of the service (ECPA). I agree that ISPs should shut off sites that are demonstrably spewing abuse and notify those sites of the problem. I've repeatedly supported several models for doing just that. However, this is different from making the ISP responsible for breaking the users connectivity prior to such an event in the name of preventing the user from shooting themselves in the foot. I further like the idea of de-peering ISPs who don't do this, and, if you can get a critical mass of the major ISPs to do that, life will start to get better. If you can't, it won't.
Do ISP's get paid to protect end user machines?
No, they get paid for traffic, which is the reason some ISPs out there don't care if their customers are DDoSing anothers network.
No, they get paid for delivering packets. They don't get paid (currently) for handling abuse complaints. Paul Vixie has proposed, and, I have supported a model which ISPs could adopt which would change this fact. Most residential ISPs get paid the same whether the customer spews abuse or not. Their costs go up some when they get abuse complaints and when abuse starts using more bandwidth, so, for the most part, most residential ISPs have no incentive to support abuse, but, not enough incentive to pay to staff an abuse department sufficiently to be truly responsive. Further, most abuse departments don't get enough support from management when the sales and marketing departments come whining about how much revenue that abusing customer produces each month. This is one of the unfortunate realities of a free-market economy. It doesn't always tie profit to doing the right thing, and, it favors short-term thinking over long-term planning.
If you want to blame someone maybe the company that provided the insecure os that requires monthly patches to fix portions of the broken code they sold. Or you could blame the end users who open unknown attachments.
Yup, we've been doing that for years, and they have been fixing things as fast as possible (not always, and not until more recently) however they are making steps in the right direction, so I feel it's about time ISP's started taking some of the responsibility for traffic on their network. As far as the attachments go, education is the only way - and if they cannot be educated they shouldn't be on the Internet.
They continue to develop new and more exploitable services and features. They continue to improve upon techniques for bypassing corporate firewalls. They are not fixing things as fast as possible, they are fixing things as they become widely known and public. They are also showing no commitment to implementing new features in a secure way, nor, indeed, any willingness to give up features in order to presreve security. They have convinced themselves (and apparently the corporate world) that they are untouchable, and they continue to rake in profits while having no accountability to the parties that are injured by their actions.
I would like a real solution to the problem. Simply blocking ports is not successful. So I recommend 2 steps.
First buy OS's that are more secure out of the box.
That's not going to happen anytime soon, even with Microsoft starting to follow the 'right' road.
I haven't seen any indication that Micr0$0ft is following the right road, just that they are bending to some public pressure to pay some level of lip-service to security. Yes, they have fixed the 100 most gaping security holes in their code this week. No, they haven't shown that new code is being written with security as an important consideration.
2nd Teach users NOT to click on every thing they see.
...and how are you going to do that? If you give a user a $10 account where they have full internet access they click on everything, then they get infected, their machine is controlled by someone else across the world and is used for DDoS attacks or spam (or..hacking, or...?) .. what are you going to do to educate them in the middle....? What is the ISP going to do to make sure that the enduser has been educated? What are you the ISP going to do to ensure the machine that was infected has now been disinfected...?
So, let me see if I have this straight... The gas company is now expected to somehow stop me from feeding gas into the water heater they don't know I've installed, or refuse to sell me gas, until I can prove that I know how to install gas appliances, because, if they sell me gas without disabling my ability to connect it to other appliances, I might. Right... That's going to happen. ISPs are like utilities. They deliver a service. The service is the acceptance and delivery of properly formed IP datagrams. If you want something different, that's a separate value- added service and you should pay more for it.
I don't expect you the ISP to solve all these problems, nor do I expect you the ISP to stop your users from getting infected.... However you the ISP are responsible for traffic coming from and going to your users, and most of us don't care if you want to allow your users to get infected, however we do care if you allow your customers to attack us.... Whether it be an attack in the form of spam, DDoS or trojan/virus spreading.
This makes sense. I've supported this. That's not what Adi and others have been saying, and, it's not what some of your statements above say. Owen -- If this message was not signed with gpg key 0FE2AA3D, it's probably a forgery.