Tuesday, March 19, 2013

As safe as . . . . .

I'm not even going to mention any names here since I don't want anyone else doing stupid things and I have NO idea who reads this (if anyone).
I find this whole thing very disturbing: as a well known geek site told me recently, anyone who wants to can find sites that will allow them to conduct DOS attacks and a whole raft of other net nastiness  . . . . . very cheaply, from a paypal account or credit card- then you merely add the target address and choose from a pulldown menu your type of attack. There are a variety of plans you can get - each attack lasts sixty seconds after which you need to renew.   There are a couple of caveats - you can find out who uses the site, and it is not protected against all of  the attacks it can provide.  . . . . supposedly the site is only for security people to test their servers.  Yeah right.

I always knew the net was as holey as a swiss cheese but this is just nuts. A teenager with a grudge can attack anything on the net. Of course, bigger and better protected servers won't notice so much but an individual might.

Did you hear about that guy who worked for WIRED who lost all his data, IDee etc.?  Apparently it was a seventeen year old kid who did it using one of these attack sites.  Yah, it's gossip but as I said above, I don't want everyone to know all about these sites: it's a bit like publishing a hitman's phone number in a national paper. You could hope that it was safe but I am not going to bet on that.

Is this freedom?

Are we being wound up in the leadup to some new global mega-agency of "Net Cops" appearing? 

I'm not sure I like either of these scenarios. 

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