Features

net.wars: Wall of sheep

 Last week at Defcon my IM ID and just enough of the password to show they knew what it was, appeared on the Wall of Sheep.

This screen projection of the user IDs, partial passwords, and activities captured by the installed sniffer inevitably runs throughout the conference. It's not that I forgot the sniffer was there, or that there is a risk in logging onto an IM client unencrypted over a Wi-Fi hot spot (at a hacker conference!) but that I had forgotten that it was set to log in automatically whenever it could.

Easily done.

It's strange to remember now that once upon a time this crowd – or at least, type of crowd – was considered the last word in electronic evil.

In 1995 the capture of Kevin Mitnick made headlines everywhere because he was supposed to be the baddest hacker ever. Yet other than gaining online access and free phone calls, Mitnick is not known to have ever profited from his crimes – he didn't sell copied source code to its owners' competitors, and he didn't rob bank accounts. We would be grateful – really grateful – if Mitnick were the worst thing we had to deal with online now.

Last night, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released its report on Personal Internet Security. It makes grim reading even for someone who's just been to Defcon and Black Hat. The various figures the report quotes, assembled after what seems to have been an excellent information-gathering process (that means, they name-check a lot of people I know and would have picked for them to talk to) are pretty depressing.

Phishing has cost US banks around $2 billion, and although the UK lags well behind - £33.5 million in bank fraud in 2006 – here, too, it's on the rise. Team Cymru found (PDF) that on IRC channels dedicated to the underground you could buy credit card account information for between $1 (basic information on a US account) to $50 (full information for a UK account); $1,599,335.80 worth of accounts was for sale on a single IRC channel in one day.

Those are among the few things that can be accurately measured: the police don't keep figures breaking out crimes committed electronically; there are no good figures on the scale of identity theft (interesting, since this is one of the things the government has claimed the ID card will guard against); and no one's really sure how many personal computers are infected with some form of botnet software – and available for control at four cents each.

The House of Lords recommendations could be summed up as "the government needs to do more".

Most of them are unexceptional: fund more research into IT security, keep better statistics. Some measures will be welcomed by a lot of us: make banks responsible for losses resulting from electronic fraud (instead of allowing them to shift the liability onto consumers and merchants); criminalize the sale or purchase of botnet "services" and require notification of data breaches. (Now I know someone is going to want to say, "If you outlaw botnets, only outlaws will have botnets", but honestly, what legitimate uses are there for botnets? The trick is in defining them to include zombie PCs generating spam and exclude PCs intentionally joined to grids folding proteins.)

Streamlined Web-based reporting for "e-crime" could only be a good thing. Since the National High-Tech Crime Unit was folded into the Serious Organised Crime Agency there is no easy way for a member of the public to report online crime. Bringing in a central police e-crime unit would also help.

The various kite mark schemes – for secure Internet services and so on – seem harmless but irrelevant.

The more contentious recommendations revolve around the idea that we the people need to be protected, and that it's no longer realistic to lay the burden of Internet security on individual computer users. I've said for years that ISPs should do more to stop spam (or "bad traffic") from exiting their systems; this report agrees with that idea.

There will likely be a lot of industry ink spilled over the idea of making hardware and software vendors liable if "negligence can be demonstrated". What does "vendor" mean in the context of the Internet, where people decide to download software on a whim? What does it mean for open source? If I buy a copy of Red Hat Linux with a year's software updates, that company's position as a vendor is clear enough. But if I download Ubuntu and install it myself?

Finally, you have to twitch a bit when you read, "This may well require reduced adherence to the 'end-to-end' principle."

That is the principle that holds that the network should carry only traffic, and that services and applications sit at the end points.

The Internet's many experiments and innovations are due to that principle. The report's basic claim is this: criminals are increasingly rampant and increasingly rapacious on the Internet. If this continues, people will catastrophically lose confidence in the Internet. So we must improve security by making the Internet safer.

Couldn't we just make it safer by letting people stop using it? That's what people tell you to do when you're at Defcon.