More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joseph Menn
The financial institutions were in no hurry to tighten standards because of a little-known fact: retailers, not banks, generally absorbed losses caused by identity thieves wielding pilfered credit card numbers. Many identity theft victims didn’t have to pay for the charges or loans made in their names. Visa and MasterCard covered the expenses, then passed them back to the businesses where goods were sold to the wrong person. That setup ensured that the credit card companies, which were often thought to be absorbing losses, actually earned money from many instances of fraud.
In darker days, when the country was full of government informers, Russians said the best way to tell who was planning to betray the confidences of a group was to look for the man who wasn’t drinking.
The big difference between the Russian Federation’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, and his successor, Vladimir Putin, is that the outside plutocrats were in charge of Yeltsin, while Putin is in charge of the plutocrats, centralizing corruption.
A bipartisan commission on U.S.-China issues that reports to Congress annually said in November 2008 that major Chinese cyberspace and space initiatives could provide “capability enabling it to prevail in a conflict with U.S. forces.” The report concluded that “since China’s current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyberwarfare so sophisticated that the United States may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts.”
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported that as many as 250 hacking groups “are tolerated and may even be encouraged by the government to enter and disrupt computer networks.”
“it doesn’t matter if you have high-end credentials if the operating system has been riddled with compromises.”
“Other countries believe that national security is dependent on economic security and, to achieve economic advantage, it is the government’s role to support indigenous industries by stealing the intellectual property created in other nations (or at least turn a blind eye when a domestic company steals information from foreign competitors),” wrote Microsoft security executive Scott Charney
For years the Eastern European mobsters got that. They found service providers based in the U.S. or with operations in the country that were either crooked themselves or very willing to take the money and ask no questions.
McQuaid began assembling a blacklist of RBN IP addresses and domain names, and he has been updating it ever since. Companies that adopted his list have reported a major drop in intrusions and malware.
Next, consumers need to do a much better job of educating themselves. The people who won’t let their lawns go uncut out of respect for the neighbors need to realize that turning on a home PC without a strong firewall and without an operating system and antivirus software that each update automatically is like leaving a loaded shotgun on the front porch for passersby; it almost guarantees that their computers will be compromised and used for nefarious activities.
“The engine of the world economy is based on this really cool experiment that is not designed for security, it’s designed for fault-tolerance,” which is a system’s ability to withstand some failures. “You can reduce your risks, but the naughty truth is that the Net is just not a secure place for business or society.”
Zittrain advocates temporarily putting two operating systems on every personal computer, which isn’t as daunting as it sounds. One would be free to explore the Web but would be barred from making changes to the machine. The other would be walled off and secure.
