The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs • Hacker News Board

Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs

#81

Post by elemeno » Fri, Jan 24, 2014, 9:21 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #47

elemeno wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because fixing the problem isn't just a matter of changing the headline back to what it was supposed to read. Someone entering your system, which is supposed to be secure, and changing the headline on your front page mean that you'll (if you're sensible) then go and contract an external firm to perform a security audit and find out how the intruders got into your system, what needs to be done to fix it, and why your…

You probably can't simply use your own staff to do it; your contractual and insurance obligations will probably mandate that a reputable third party conduct the audit. That's not always the case, but in big cases it usually is.

Oh, absolutely. In my arena, finance, there's no way you'd use your own staff - it would go straight to external auditors who'd conduct the investigation or contract specialist firms to investigate. Of course, not always going to be the case for smaller companies and more minimal impact cases.

Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs

#82

Post by Fuxy » Fri, Jan 24, 2014, 10:00 AM UTC

If this "War on Hackers" truly becomes an issue this could potentially be the most damaging war in the American economy.

Hackers are nothing like drug dealer the same people that vandalize a few websites when their teenagers and part of anonymous could later become the founders of the next great company like google.

By giving hacker overly hash punishments the US government is hurting their potential to do good by unnecessarily exposing them to a world (prisons) where the likelihood of them doing more black-hat hacking is higher.

Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs

#83

Post by danielweber » Fri, Jan 24, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #68

tptacek wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Straightforward. * Employees of the company spend X number of days responding to the incident, and you take their fully loaded cost and divide it out by the number of days they spent having to deal with the incident, and that's a big number. Plus: * If the site is disabled or degraded, you can often easily calculate outage costs based on the average volume of revenue the site generates during the outage period. Plus:…

> "Employees of the company spend X number of days responding to the incident, and you take their fully loaded cost and divide it out by the number of days they spent having to deal with the incident, and that's a big number." That should be discounted by the amount of time they spent getting their site up to basic good practices, if any. Otherwise it makes hacking the incompetent a greater crime than cracking in to…

Damages are damages. If I throw a bowling ball into your garage late at night, is it "fair" that I have to pay more because you own a new Ferrari while the damages would be much less if you owned a 15 year old Honda?

Once you commit a tort, it's generally all on you.

Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs

#84

Post by bernardom » Fri, Jan 24, 2014, 3:08 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #35

bernardom wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sideways-related question. What if Tribune had a sister company in some other country (Australia) that did something completely unrelated. Sell children's toys or something. An admin for the sister company gives up his credentials in order for Anonymous to deface the children's site. They instead use it to deface the Chicago Tribune. The admin has no earthly clue that the systems are inter-related. In fact, they've b…

As I understand it, he's guilty, but potentially not as guilty. He's an accomplice if he understood the goals of Anonymous, gave them credentials to further their acts, but didn't map out with them exactly what they were going to do --- accomplice liability is for all intents in purposes liability. On the other hand, if he casually gave them credentials because what the fuck who cares, and had no understanding that A…

Got it. So it's sort of like the difference between "willingly and knowingly" giving away the credentials and "willingly" giving away the credentials.

The intent matters.

Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs

#85

Post by tsotha » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 9:19 AM UTC

There's a big difference between putting a substance into your own body and breaking into someone else's computer and taking their data. Personally I think the punishments for "hacking", the way the term is used in this article, are too light.

Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs

#86

Post by stretchwithme » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 6:27 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #79

stretchwithme wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until someone tells a robot to go out and gather carbon compounds.

Like this: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer ?

Its not in a human beings best interests to create something capable of undergoing an intelligence explosion. Of course, that won't prevent somebody from doing it.

Its better to control the technology you're using. Most robots will be either remotely controlled or designed to handle a specific domain. To create a potential competitor with an ever-evolving ability to compete is very dangerous.

But even drones will be very dangerous even when tightly controlled by someone malicious.

I'd say we have some interesting challenges ahead of us.