Senate bill seeks crack down on cybercrime havens
Foreign countries that turn a blind eye to cybercrime would lose US financial assistance and resources under a bill introduced Tuesday in the Senate. The International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act would require the President to identify "countries of cyber concern" and to plot a course to help each one get tougher …
Well, that’s interesting: “cyber crime”: does that include “wire fraud”?. And why only foreign countries?
eBay’s registered office is in Switzerland or somewhere. Does this mean that, as the gang of white-collar criminals running eBay are knowingly, and by deliberate design, aiding and abetting wire fraud on consumer the world over, the US President will identify eBay’s country of residence as a “country of cyber concern” and will he then get the FBI, or whoever, to do something about this most unscrupulous white-collar criminal organization (eBay, that is)?
I notice too that neither eBay’s nor PayPal’s names appear in the list of companies that support this bill: a bit of sensitivity there I suspect, and anyway the record of these two is of much talk but little action—unless, of course, they themselves are the victims of the crime.
The full ugly details on eBay at: http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502877
... because far too many US-based ISPs couldn't care less if their customers' computers are botnet-infested zombies. As far as these ISPs are concerned, it's one of those "not my problem" things.
ISPs are practically aiding and abetting criminal activity by not at *least* notifying customers when a problem is brought to the attention of the ISP.
Couldn't that be a national security risk to the US, having all those US computers being controlled by some botmaster who may or may not wish to cause damage to the US?
The only time some ISPs pay attention is if zombie activity causes enough traffic for some bandwidth cap to be exceeded. In fact, that's often the only time the *customers* care if their own computers are infected - I've lost track of how many times I've heard people say, "I'm not worried about viruses [malware] because there's nothing on my computer worth stealing." They don't know, and don't care, about botnets etc.
For individuals *and* ISPs, it seems that as long as it doesn't affect them directly, it's business as usual, nevermind that the ISP's customers are unwitting participants in criminal activity.
Where it not for the fact that a vast portion of global cyber crime is carried out using machines located inside the United States. They may be controlled by criminals outside that nation's borders, this is true - but when the off-switch, to much of the world's bot nets, lies within your own reach, then the cry from other nations might well be, that if the physician will not heal himself, will he at least turn off his bloody life-support?
...it is _because_ so many US citizens are infected.
As seen in El Reg, the white hats now have the tools to detect and map botnet control structures. In juristictions where we have legal friendliness, there have already been meaningful takedowns based on court orders..
Having criminal processes around the world should help reduce spam.
Unlike the War on Drugs, which is attempting to stop a product that people want, and has already killed 14,000 people in North America, the War on Spam is attempting to stop a product which nobody other than the criminals wants.
There are only two types of Cybercrime which the U.S. is interested in squashing: Music sharing and porn websites.
If Cybercrime = Botnets, phishers, Nigerian thugs, then I'm OK with that.
If Cybercrime = "copyright violation" ... then sod off. That would be as retarded as the "Mexico City Treaty" that Clinton killed, Bush revived and then Obama killed again. The least thing we want is the idiotic DMCA to be practically enforced outside the US just because the US would cut economical aid to the countries who do not give a flying f**k about their "copyright".
There are so many do-gooding UN-style "non-profits" out there you could never 'crack down' on anything.
Theres alot of US internet steering groups that funnel money from the US to foreign countries to deploy internet connectivity.
Alot of this goes through the NSF or through other grants.
One of the groups we watch is in a sure-fire hurry to get the internet back on in haiti as fast as possible.
I've never been to haiti, I know it's rated about the poorest country in the world. I would have to say high-speed internet is probably one of the last things they could use at about this time.
But hey that's just me, in case you haven't watched the US news lately, Washington DC is a crime haven itself.
Did I mention the money used for this type of stuff is stolen from the taxpayers of the US? Don't worry, when you see those spam emails come in at 3am from south america it should just make you feel good that they have the internet they need to spam and scam you.
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