[LINK] The bad guys have won (was Re: www.ipv6.org.au/summit)

[Stilgherrian]

On 01/09/2008, at 1:41 AM, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-08-31 at 16:46 +0200, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> our next
>> best defence is a hardware firewall ie a commodity router/firewall/
>> modem and they have been remarkably successful.
> well, no, not really. They are spectactularly *UN*successful at
> protecting anyone from viruses, trojans, phishing attacks, malicious
> downloads, web-based OS exploits, and a host of other nasties. Insofar
> as they provide protection at all, it is against classes of attack  
> that
> are relatively uncommon and that (with very few exceptions) have  
> little
> chance of success anyway. The millions of infected zombie machines out
> there are testament to how effective commodity CPE is at protecting
> things.

One only has to read about the Storm Botnet...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet

     Some have estimated that by September 2007 the Storm botnet was
     running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems.
     [1][2]... More conservatively, one network security analyst
     claims to have developed software that has crawled the botnet and
     estimates that it controls 160,000 infected computers.[3] ... the
     Storm worm at one point accounting for 8% of all malware on
     Microsoft Windows computers.[4]

     The Storm botnet has been used in a variety of criminal
     activities. Its controllers, and the authors of the Storm Worm,
     have not yet been identified...

I suggest people also read about Ivan Krstic's view that the computing  
industry relies on “utterly obsolete concepts and assumptions” and has  
“massively failed when it comes to desktop security”.

     The way modern desktop security works is by relying on the user
     to make informed and sensible choices on things they don’t
     understand.

     http://stilgherrian.com/internet/who_do_you_trust_everyone/

Enjoy. Or not.

Stil


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