Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Rampaging Cybercrooks

Frightening Security.  Recently, I was enthralled by an account of how difficult it is to detect and remove zombieware from our machines.  Next, I ran into a klez.h deposited deep in the bowels of an administrative MSN directory on my machine.  I can recall when my system was vulnerable (I had to do a registry recovery), and it still bothers me that the penetration must have occured through other than e-mail.  I have not done the forensics to be satisfied that my system is clean and that I understand the infection vector.

Today, David Coursey mentions a discussion where it landed "how really frightening this whole security thing has become.  Professional cybercriminals, working on a global basis, are a serious threat and not enough is being done.  There is a danger that the value the average consumer places on the Internet could soon be overwhelmed by the threat of what might happen if they do use it.  Goodbye Internet?"

I use Zone Alarm Pro on my laptop, and I like it a lot except for a certain level of inscrutibility that comes with it being easy to use.  (Is that necessary?  I wonder.)  I will look at the link to Guidance Software too.  I confess that I have a concern that, whatever the intentions, cyber-protection organizations depend on the existence of cyber-criminality for their daily bread.  How does one secure a safe neighborhood in an inherently unsafe (?) world?
posted by Dennis at 5/19/2004 08:54:41 AM