{"id":113,"date":"2012-01-10T11:40:59","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T19:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/?p=113"},"modified":"2012-01-10T11:40:59","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T19:40:59","slug":"fatal-system-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/2012\/01\/10\/fatal-system-error\/","title":{"rendered":"Fatal System Error"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet<\/a>\"\"
\nBy Joseph Menn
\n304 Pages<\/p>\n

The Cybercrime genre is starting to come in to its own, developing a standard style of first hand accounts from those in the trenches performing daring technological feats of dubious legality. \u00a0Menn flips the template a bit by following two “whitehats” Barrelt Lyon and Andrew Crocker as they attempt to fight the proliferation of international organized cybercrime. \u00a0Lyon is the hero hacker who uses his self taught skills to defend companies from DOS attacks. \u00a0His work brings him perilously close to the world of organized crime. \u00a0His first clients run semi-legal online gambling sites. \u00a0The online extortion they are subject to and the protection money they are intimidated in to paying are straight out of the Sopranos. \u00a0Lyon finds ways to offer legal protection to these and more legitimate companies through the use of sophisticated packet filtering and massive bandwidth reserves although his own company gets tied up with shady investors. \u00a0He takes the fight to the cybercriminals by actively mapping their informal and formal networks in eastern europe and russia, exposing their mob connections. \u00a0His attempts to get \u00a0law enforcement involved go largely ignored.<\/p>\n

While the US comes across as either\u00a0willfully incompetent or good\u00a0naturedly\u00a0handicapped by the lack of international cooperation depending on the agency, the British are well ahead and actually pioneer international cyberlaw\u00a0enforcement\u00a0through new fashioned detective work. \u00a0Enter Andrew Crocker a British detective and pioneer in eastern european cybercrime investigation. \u00a0Andrew builds trust with Russian law enforcement the Russian way, heavy drinking. \u00a0He manages to get stationed in Russia and actively pursues one cell of Botnet controllers responsible for early DDOS attacks. Through\u00a0perseverance\u00a0and guts he pursues the criminals through a corrupt legal system and organized crime, eventually securing one of, if not the, first cybercrime conviction in russia for international crimes. \u00a0Despite all the effort his methods fell by the wayside after the post 9\/11 shift in security resources towards terrorism. \u00a0Only now, over a decade later is the true threat of cybercrime becoming widely apparent as Menn alludes in his final chapters. \u00a0We are left with a system whose defenders are informal groups of dedicated and skilled whitehats. \u00a0We need them now more than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet By Joseph Menn 304 Pages The Cybercrime genre is starting to come in to its own, developing a standard style of first hand accounts from those in the trenches performing daring technological feats of dubious legality. \u00a0Menn flips the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}