[91492] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: mitigating botnet C&Cs has become useless
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Vixie)
Wed Aug 2 02:31:02 2006
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com>
Date: 02 Aug 2006 06:29:55 +0000
In-Reply-To: <44d020fd.2b5.5b81.558480853@mauigateway.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
surfer@mauigateway.com ("Scott Weeks") writes:
> ... I'm just saying that there has to be a better way than police-type
> actions on a global scale. ...
no, there doesn't have to be such a way. where the stakes are in meatspace
(pun unintended), the remediation has to be in meatspace. cyberspace is
just a meatspace overlay, it can only pretend to have different laws when
nothing outside of cyberspace is at stake. i think that the days when
botnets were mostly used for kiddie-on-kiddie violence or even gangster-on-
gangster violence are permanently behind us. it's up to the real LEOs now,
because it's on their turf now, which is to say, it's in the real world now.
as was true of spam when i said this about spam ten years ago, it is true
now of botnets that the only technical solution is "gated communities". but
the internet's culture, which merely mirrors the biases of those who use it,
requires the ability for children to go door to door selling girl scout
cookies, without necessarily having the key code to every one of the doors.
so the internet community has no appetite for the trappings of any technical
solution to botnets. the meatspace community and their LEOs absolutely *do*.
--
Paul Vixie
