Blitz of "Cyber Attacks," Leading Up to Cybersecurity Act of 2009, page 2

Good Evening All,

Beyond the actual inability of the Govt to shut off the internet is the reality of the internet as an industry. The USA controls the .com .net and .org, .us and a few other domain extensions. Country code extensions are controlled within the country they represent. So Canada controls the .ca etc etc.

To proclaim that they can simply kill an industry, putting many hundreds of thousands of people out of work in an instant without any regard for the livelihood of these people would be insane.

I have to agree that there needs to be some control over some aspects of the internet, so things like DDOS, ftp trolling and web attacks can be stopped, but a certain amount of responsibility to secure these systems relies on the system owner.

Websites that employ CMS systems like Joomla, Drupla, and many Wordpress installs are a security void. The sysadmins on these systems really need to have some liability applied to them in order for them to start taking server security seriously. Many of these would be sysadmins are just counting themselves lucky to actually make the software work, believing that security is already built in; experience teaches us otherwise.

The home users that choose not to use antivirus, (I know it sounds retarded) or who rely on windows firewalls to secure their systems need to be held responsible when their systems become zombies used in these cyber attacks.
Currently, if your system participates in a DDOS, if you ever find out, you say "oops" and bear no financial responsibility for the damage your system helped cause. I can think of no other industry where this kind of total disregard for safety is tolerated.

So on one hand I agree that a self regulated internet is an information utopia where we can all participate as responsible adults, but as a service provider with a large-ish investment in e-mail, web and dns infrastructure I am getting extremely fed up with the huge number of would be attacks coming out of the asia pacific netblocks. Even though they aren't successful against my particular setup doesn't change that a certain amount of resources are used to combat these attacks anyways. So something needs to be done to ensure the survivability of the internet, while maintaining a free flowing information resource. Is more govt. interference the answer, I certainly hope not, but it may be our only choice.

Thanks for reading.
..Ex