And you thought that Lycos’ “Make Love Not Spam” screensaver was bad (or good, depending on how you looked at it).
A company called Symbiot has developed a software package which is ostensibly designed to protect your system from attacks…by mounting a good offense qua defense.
Using a process which it calls “Graduated Response”, the software first attempts to block the attacking packets, or deflect them to another target (that sounds abuseable, doesn’t it?), or simulate a response to throw the attacker off the track.
So far, so good.
But listen to this. If the system deems that more drastic measures are needed, it can move to full-on attack mode itself, including such measure as, and Aunty is quoting here:
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“Invasive Techniques – obtaining access privileges on the attacker’s system, and then pursuing a strategy of disabling, destroying, or seizing control over the attacking assets.
Symmetric Counterstrike – sending exploits and other attacks which are specific to vulnerabilities on the attacker’s system, in an amount proportional to their current attacks.
Asymmetric Counterstrike – preemptive measures in response to distributed attacks orchestrated by a known source. This retaliation could be far in excess of the attack that the aggressor has underway.”
There isn’t a measure there which Aunty would consider legally sound, no matter what you think of the ethics or morality of the measures. Even Symbiot itself says that it is “continually evaluating the legal aspects of these more aggressive countermeasures in coordination with law enforcement agencies at various levels. While we believe that our iSIMS attacker profiling, reconnaissance and identification products allow quantified evaluation of attacker identities, we stress that our customers should obtain appropriate advice and information to make decisions that will not violate applicable laws.”
Funny, though, Aunty doesn’t see any customer indemnification warranty anywhere on their site.
Still, it would have been kind of fun to see what would have happened if Graduated Response had met Make Love Not Spam.
You can read more about this at the [Page no longer available – we have linked to the archive.org version instead].
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Unfortunately, the majority of computers used in DDOS are owned by people who have no concept of what computer security is all about. Because they leave their computer on line 24-7 and donot have the basic protection ie: a firewall, antivirus malware prgs their computer is easily cloned and used to attack other computers.
By counter attacking the wrong culprit the prg will actually cause even more problems.
Not a very well thought out solution. IMO the company should address the real problem and help educate the growing number of computer illiterate people as to the basics of computer security.