Horrible Story of Digital Harassment
This is just awful.
Their troll—or trolls, as the case may be—have harassed Paul and Amy in nearly every way imaginable. Bomb threats have been made under their names. Police cars and fire trucks have arrived at their house in the middle of the night to respond to fake hostage calls. Their email and social media accounts have been hacked, and used to bring ruin to their social lives. They’ve lost jobs, friends, and relationships. They’ve developed chronic anxiety and other psychological problems. More than once, they described their lives as having been “ruined” by their mystery tormenter.
We need to figure out how to identify perpetrators like this without destroying Internet privacy in the process.
EDITED TO ADD: One of the important points is the international nature of many of these cases. Even once the attackers are identified, the existing legal system isn’t adequate for shutting them down.
Z • January 27, 2016 7:12 AM
Find a way to do this, and you basically find the itsec holy grail – the ability to go against the hackers. There are thousands, millions of vulnerabilities of various types that need to be addressed for IT systems to be secure, a ridiculously unfair task when the bad guy only need to find one or a few to success. This asymmetry in the effort and resources evolved between offense and defense is the big reason why we are in the current mess.
But find a way to reliably get to the bad guys, and suddenly the whole equation change. There are way less cybercriminals out there than vulnerabilities to patch and/or mitigate, so going against cybercriminals themselves make much more logistical sense. If you can do that, it doesn’t matter as much if your information assets are perfectly protected or not. Suddenly, the defensive side isn’t as powerless as it was.