A mock trial, in which ISPs were sued for damage done by a zombie network to a few fictitious companies’ business and financial interests, found that a jury of IT professionals overwhelmingly held the opinion that the ISPs were not responsible for the damage flowing from their networks via the zombied machines.
The mock trial was hosted by the Gartner Group during its Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington D.C..
An electronic poll taken at the end of the “trial” showed that while 71% the hundreds of IT professionals present felt that zombies and the botnets which control them are a serious problem for businesses, only 30% felt that the “plaintiff” businesses had an actual case. Fifty-four percent bought the ISPs’ position that it would be an impermissible violation of their customers’ privacy to check their computers for signs of having been zombied, and that it would be nearly impossible for an ISP to distinguish between legitimate traffic and that coming from a zombied machine such as a spam run or denial of service attack.
[The other sixteen percent voted for the NOTA candidate, Michael Jackson.]
Explained Gartner cybersecurity analyst Rich Mogull, on behalf of the ISPs, “Suing us is like suing the telephone company for a bomb threat because they allowed it to be called in. There has to be an attacker someplace, and it doesn’t seem like they’re suing the attackers.”
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