It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in trouble. Still, give our hometown paper credit for trying new business models. Last week we saw the Post move strongly into the “collectible knick-knack” market. This week? They’re trying their hand at becoming a network security firm / law enforcement agency (this via Tom Bridge.
Snark aside, this really is a pretty impressive accomplishment for a journalist. Brian Krebs’ reporting led directly to a major spam colocation facility getting knocked offline by its upstream bandwidth providers. The result is reportedly a staggering 75% overnight drop in net-wide spam. That won’t last, of course, but it’s still awfully impressive. (Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that the Post has caused trouble for botnet operators.)
Not to diminish Krebs’ accomplishment, but the ease with which this was done — a civilian making some phone calls, basically — also hints at the lameness of our law enforcement agencies’ online efforts. This was a U.S. company that was plainly harboring illegal activity. Krebs spoke to some security researchers who let him know about it, then he called the folks providing the malefactors’ network connections. Those providers said “wow! you’re right!” and pulled the plug. It took time, initiative, and cleverness (the threat of Krebs’ bully pulpit helped, no doubt), but it didn’t take any warrants or indictments.
Meanwhile, the people nominally charged with prosecuting these sorts of crimes are — what? Posing as sexy teens in chatrooms? Fretting about cyberterrorism? It was, admittedly, the Army, not law enforcement, that published the recent asinine report examining Twitter’s capacity for supporting terrorists’ activities. Still, that mindset seems to be pervasive: people just don’t get very excited about going after online criminals who steal money and productivity. Instead electronic crime needs to be blown up into an existential threat — it’s about terrorists! Or hostile foreign governments! Or sexual predators! What it really is is a waste of time and money.
A long way from a fascist killing machine.