[wplug] Govt. authority over crack attempts?

[Jonathan S Billings]

On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 09:28, Russ Schneider wrote:
> Does anyone else think there should be some sort of government authority 
> when it comes to illegal crack attempts of networks?  (If their is one, 
> what is it?)

I don't think that any government authority has the time or the patience
to deal with this kind of behavior, and recent evidence has shown that
attempts to track down users and prosecute them usually ends up with
violations of civil liberties, as well as lots of errors and mistakes.

Just sitting around and hoping the government is going to fix the
problem is going to just lead to more problems.  The best advice I have
is this:  The internet is a shared resource.  People will abuse it, so
you have to make sure you keep secure.  Most of the high profile cracks
I've seen have been due to a sloppy setup or lazy sysadmin who hasn't
kept up with the latest security.  

People are going to try to crack into your systems, if you are on a
public network.  Even if there were some US authority, that wouldn't
stop the foreign crackers.  And even if you ignored all foreign
connections, the open nature of the internet is still going to leave
your system vulnerable to crack attempts.

-- 
Jonathan S Billings <billings at negate.org>
TSFNKP, President and Chief Lackey