FBI's Top Cyber-cop Says We're Losing the War Against Hackers 134
New submitter sienrak writes "Shawn Henry, who is preparing to leave the FBI after more than two decades with the bureau, said in an interview that the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is 'unsustainable.' 'I don't see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it's an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security,' Mr. Henry said."
Given the previous FBI story... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well of course they are losing the battle..... a house fighting against itself will fall.
Of course he would (Score:5, Insightful)
Economic espionage is an excellent excuse for implementing centralized control of the internet.
The new "Think of the Children" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Privacy and Security". Watch those words, folks. In the name of privacy and security we have already given up bits of both. This yahoo wants us to give up even more. Fear the person who says he can guarantee your privacy and security because first you need to give those up to him.
The Propaganda war has begun (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you feel it? The government wants to get control of the internet, and computers, and all communications devices in general.
They're going to pretend it's for our safety. They just want to protect us from hackers, after all.
I'm not a "government is evil" guy, but this is the kind of thing governments typically want to do. And it has to be prevented. Call your congressman.
Re:Given the previous FBI story... (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully agree (Score:2, Insightful)
I fully agree. We need a change in legislation.
And I propose the following: make every technician in charge of systems security liable for hacks to their network. And systems manufcaturers too. Make security a a requirement, and not a suggestion.
You know, cause some people might interpret "change in legislation" as "we want to spy on all citizens". Which is useless.
pot and kettle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone else find it ironic that the FBI, of all organizations, (perhaps besides the NSA) is whining about losing to people hacking into our privacy? Isn't that what they do for a living? Not just to "the other people", but to our own citizens all the same nowadays?
They're grousing over a problem that they're part of...
Re:Given the previous FBI story... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, see it's just a word replaced incorrectly. they're losing the war against profit. "Cybercrime" is just the justification. They want people to spend more money under the guise of counter-terrorism.
Re:Of course he would (Score:3, Insightful)
Economic espionage is an excellent excuse for implementing centralized control of the internet.
And as long as corporations are not controlled by the government, their security is their responsibility. Let them handle it.
Don't aim to outrun the bear... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are hackers, phishers, spammers, and other untrustworthy people on the internet. The FBI seems to have just realized that they can't prevent them from existing, and now tells us that we'll "never be secure", and people react. But this has always been the case offline as well. There are thieves, murderers, and con-artists, and we can never make them go away either, and as such, here too, we will never be secure.
That said, if you use common sense, encrypt your important data, don't click links in unsolicited emails, and use a password better than "12345", you'll already be enough of a pain to most "hackers" that they'll not bother, because next door, there's a guy who's got a plaintext full of banking passwords on his desktop with file sharing on.
There's a saying that if attacked by a hungry bear, you don't need to outrun the bear, just the other people at the campground. Same goes here.
Dr. Strangelove (Score:4, Insightful)
"Mr. President, we must not allow... a hacker gap!"
Standard tactic for getting the government to spend money on a military-industrial complex project.
Doomed to fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't aim to outrun the bear... (Score:5, Insightful)
The FBI is also dealing with a lot of businesses who have existed for years with at best paying lip service to computer security.
I remember a few years back so many PHBs saying, "security has no ROI" like it was a mantra for magic success. Of course when I asked the person about what they do if they do get breached, the answer was invariably, "Call Geek Squad, and they will fix it."
The sad thing is that there is no real drive for private businesses to focus on actual security. A breach happens, and usually it won't be reported, and if it is, it is because there are thousands of people who got nailed and have hard evidence finding who did it upstream. Even though there are laws to disclose breaches with private info lost, it isn't hard to ignore them -- the company top brass will find a fall guy, and the domain admin password will continue to remain "swordfish". Even if the firm goes bankrupt, it doesn't really matter, because the top brass just finds a niche somewhere else.
There is also the belief that intruders won't do much damage. A wiped box? Stick in a backup tape. Lost customer info? Not our problem if customers get identity theft issues. Lost source code? The H-1Bs end up copying it to their home soil anyway.
Until the attitude that security is a cost center with nothing to gain back goes away, it is no wonder that criminal organizations and foreign intel departments are having a field day.
Ironically, where I see actual improvement in security is in government. The main reason is that government departments (and this applies not just to the US but any country out there) have a lot to lose, especially around election years. Companies can fold and the CEO just moves to a new venture, but a government department that is weak on security will face the wrath of the voters, as well as any elected official that is looking to keep their jobs. In countries that are not democracies, it can mean loss of face for leadership which will be swiftly dealt with.
Businesses need to invest in IT from day 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
At least, that is what I got out of the warnings in the article. It wasn't about the FBI needing more money, so much as his discussion of the absolutely deplorable state of most business networks. Most businesses, even IT managers within businesses, seem to think that best security practice means sending someone to a Cisco firewall class, putting an ASA into an external facing connection, and passing a security scan as all they need to stop the bad guys. They never really consider what it means to really monitor the health of a network, or have an understanding of how their internal applications operate across their machines, nor are they willing to really invest in the kind of staffing and knowledge needed to make sure their data is actually secure. In the end, they are better off with making that early investment, because that knowledge also translates into fewer expenditures on gimmicky appliances, and a better focus on having things run right. It is a shame that mostly these businesses are blithely whistling past the graveyard.
Most businesses seem to miss from the day they replaced their file drawers with a file server, they went from a "widget" company to an IT company that does widgets. It is a subtle but definitive change in how businesses need to focus investments in resources. Unfortunately, most businesses just don't get it. They think because some snake oil dealer slapped "security" on the side of the box that the word means anything.
What I'd like to see is ACM, the ISC, ISC2 (no relation), and other organizations start pushing for more stringent best practices written into regulation (not law). Basically, if a business doesn't take the effort to invest in their own security, then they should be held liable if they get broken into. Don't expect insurance to pay out. Don't expect to be personally shielded by corporate liability if your client data goes into the wild. On the other hand, if businesses DO meet those standards, then they likewise shouldn't be held liable. I would really like to see the above organizations testifying on the Hill about what that would mean.
Re:The Propaganda war has begun (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep.
Even on /. there was at least half a dozen stories matching the "$insider says $hackers have already compromised >90% of computers in ($line_of_business|$federal_department|...)"
Feels like someone's preparing the ground to bring out some new legislation.
Changes in Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
The technology is fine, the problem is the user-centric security that everything employs. There's an alternative called the principle of least privilege [wikipedia.org], which we use all the time in other aspects of life, just not with computers.
You might be tempted to think you know of a system that actually uses this, but you're wrong. The term capability has a lot of uses, and the application of it in Posix or Symbian systems isn't the same thing.
Only when we stop assuming that a program should be able to have free run of everything will we be able to fix this problem.
It's almost like there's an active conspiracy to keep this idea in obscurity..... but probably not.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
The OP lives in USA which is - last time I checked - a representative democracy. It might be imperfect one (=difficult to break the two-party system) but it's still a democracy... which means that The Government is just the set of institutions that The Population has built. Saying that you aren't part of the government in such a state is saying that you can't influence the decision making process, which probably means that you are too young to vote.
It doesn't help if you say "I'm a LIBERTARIAN. I want the fed abolished...". Even ignoring all arguments about how you can't exclude yourself from a group just because you don't believe in everything it has democratically decided... This is FBI we are talking about. Even the most idealistic libertarians would say "The government has only one job: Keep us safe from the bad guys" (i.e. power to use violence is the only true natural monopoly) so this is perhaps the one institution that libertarians would retain.
War? hackers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Solving the problem might require abandoning the "war" metaphor. Declaring this a "war" is a way of allowing the authorities to ignore insignificant (to them) things like legality and morality. The inevitable result, which we're already seeing, is offending a lot of the population by the overreaction and "scorched earth" tactics. Taking down sites without any semblance of due process is guaranteed to hurt a lot of innocent bystanders, and as with real wars, this just turns the population against you.
This is much like the "war on drugs". Even those of us who don't abuse (or even use) illegal drugs are still very likely to be offended by the atrocities committed by the warriors. Taking people's cars, homes, and sometimes lives without any sort of trial is both wrong and counterproductive, but it's what the "war" metaphor leads to.
There's also a major problem with the media's expropriation of the term "hacker", which was originally a term of high praise for a technical expert, retargetting (;-) it as a term for an anti-social criminal. This tends to get the message across that people with technical expertise in software security are considered suspect by the media and the general population. You want these people on your side. Characterizing them as criminals isn't the best way to make this happen.
As long as we have a "war against hackers", I'd expect the problems to get worse. That phrase itself is pretty much a guarantee that the problems won't be approached in a reasonable fashion. It also guarantees that lots of innocent bystanders will be hit by the warlike measures. Even worse, people who could have helped you will be classified as hackers and, uh, "discouraged" from helping find the solutions.
I'm reminded of the time, back in the 1960s, when a "War on Poverty" was declared here in the US. That one ended rather quickly, as lots of poor people started publicly asking where they could go to surrender. But it's not obvious that the large population of software "hackers" will take this approach. If I happened to be a software expert with some expertise in computer security, where would I go to surrender?
Re:Security is (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the quote you're looking for is "Security is a process, not a product." --Bruce Schneier [schneier.com].
Re:Given the previous FBI story... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of some concern may be the following:
A "loosing the battle" statement, in modern history, is often precedent to a mass disruption of civil rights.
So I would like to see what this one will conjure. OSs with required government back door? Ban on cryptography?