Blog 10, Curtis Klein

On your blog write a synopsis of what you heard on this NPR interview.

There is a new (or what seems to be new, but is really an expanded old problem) threat to computer security called “denial of service attacks”. It is caused by “gangs” that operate over the internet for extortion, political, malicious, or other reasons. They can use banks of computers to send thousands of contacts to a company’s server over the internet, and overload the company’s ability to operate their computers and internet access. One example is offshore internet gambling companies that were forced to pay extortion to prevent this action, which would have put them out of business. Because this is done over the internet the organizations who do this can be anywhere in the world, along with fact that these peoples skills are often very useful to their governments, makes law enforcement extremely difficult, if not impossible. This is not only a problem for businesses; put is also a serious threat to national security and anyone else using the internet.

Do to the ability of these organizations to control thousands of computers remotely; these gangs do not even need to be that large. They can access innocent people’s computers, and use them to act as “robots”, without the owner’s knowledge. To add to this vulnerability: many developing countries use pirated software and operating systems, which can not get the upgrades that would help protect them.

One of the ways to prevent this is to have a protection of very large capacity computers that can handle more traffic than the criminals can send, and have them act as buffers. Barrett Lyon and Joseph Menn, the interviewees in this NPR interview, have managed to track some of the perpetrators be determining which of the corrupted computers used in the attacks had their SNMP (A remote viewing protocol) enabled, access the computer, and backtrack the hackers. He was able to contact them, gain there trust, and over a period of time get enough information to physically track them down. However legal action was not applied, because they are in Russia, and Russia uses them for political and military purposes, as China is also well known for.