So, wll you be turning off your firewall and removing your router passwords first to be the test case? On 9/25/08, michael.dillon@bt.com <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote:
let's push this stuff back into the nation-states who sponsor it and then use treaties to wall it off inside those places.
Let's not mince words. You want to wall off the Chinese and Russian Internets because you believe that the reason so much cybercrime originates there is for political reasons (state sponsorship) rather than economic ones. Have you ever visited these countries (Moscow and Beijing don't count) and seen how people live? There is a much larger economic incentive than you can imagine. Using the exchange rate figures from xe.com does not tell you how valuable an American dollar is in those countries. You need to spend enough time in the country to see how it costs to ride a bus, buy your lunch, etc.
In fact, cybercrime originates abroad because the economic incentive is so great in those countries, and their level of technical education is high enough that they can actually build the distributed software systems that they need to drive the flow of hard cash.
Fiddling with router configs, or mail server configs, does not change this. In fact, the economic incentive for a NANOG reader to block the bad stuff is probably a lot lower than for the foreign bad guy to evade your blocks. He will just route around your efforts.
Economic and legal problems should be fixed in the economic and legal system, not in network operations. People on this list would do more good by supporting legal and economic efforts to fix the problem than by tweaking their routers. Or by simply ignoring the problem because it is a lot easier for law enforcement to hit a standing target.
In any case, I don't believe that nation states sponsor cybercrime. Bad guys are found in every country and they will always act for their own benefit regardless of what laws or treaties may be put in place. Over the past 15 years, it has been shown that network vigilantism does not work. If anything, this just makes cybercriminals stronger by forcing them to evolve their systems, and by weeding out the less intelligent ones.
--Michael Dillon
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