Fergie's Tech Blog

Where Are the Feds on Cyber Security?

Ira Winkler writes on CIO.com:

A couple of recent events have shown how purposefully useless the U.S. government is with regard to cybersecurity. Every so often, the FBI parades some success stories through the media. Unfortunately, what's behind them are prosecutions for show rather than true demonstrations of tackling cybercrime.

For example, U.S. law enforcement had nothing to do with the takedown of McColo, the ISP that was home to major botnet controllers. It's telling that foreign criminal gangs felt comfortable enough to use a U.S.-based service to host their critical servers.

Despite the fact that the crimes enabled by McColo included child pornography, cyberextortion, distribution of malware, identity theft -- really, just about every cybercriminal act known to law enforcement -- the FBI had nothing to do with taking down the hosting service or making any arrests of those profiting from criminal behavior. It was up to independent malware researchers to identify McColo and work with upstream ISPs to cut it off from the Internet. That is despicable.

posted by Fergie @ 2/16/2009 09:35:00 PM