Kill Zombies
by tdaxp ~ April 29th, 2008
Slashdot links to two amazingly interesting posts, “Owning Kraken Zombies, a Detailed Discussion” and “Kraken Botnet Infiltration.” Kraken is a botnet, or network of infested computers, that is used for bad beeds such as password cracking and distributed denial of service attacks.
The researchers discovered a way to kill Kraken, limiting the zombie infestation. As the researchers note, “What if that target system is responsible for someones life support?”
The law should allow for zombies to be lobotomized at will, and should protect those who do so. Any bad effects should be the responsibility of those who care and give support for the zombies — their system administrators — and note anti-zombie “concerned local citizens.”
That’s the 2nd Amendment applied to cyberspace. That’s the American Way.
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2 008/06/19/the-foreign-polic...
April 30th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
The protection would need to be from both criminal and civil liability.
This sort of thing has always been a controversy in the information security field. The consensus has been don’t counter-attack because 1) you have criminal/civil protection and don’t expect your employer to stick up for you (they will most likely fire you at the first sign of litigation or bad press - corporate CYA syndrome), and 2) You could do bad things by mistake as part of the counter attack.
I have only counter-attacked once. Somebody was abusing a DNS server that the NSP I worked for owned. I ping-of-death’d his ass.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:19 am
Relatedly, as it goes to the Zombie crisis, I just finished World War Z [1]. I had listened to the abridged audio a bit ago, but I heard about enough things that were in the book but not audio (North Korea’s defensive posture, etc) that I wanted to check it out.
Extremely good. Highly recommended.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Z-History-Zombie/dp/0307346609