We Need A Botnet Law Like RICO
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The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act commonly referred to as RICO, has been around since 1970. The Act basically was designed to hit organized crime hard by taking their biggest weapon away from them. That being cash and investments which were received by illegal means. The basics of the law is that anyone who belongs to an enterprise who violates certain laws can be charged with racketeering. All assets of the person can then be seized and taken away from the person.
Over at CNet one botnet expert suggests this would be one way to go after those who use botnets to acquire information from our computers. The article states that:
Researchers have focused on trying to stop attacks, but once they get a botnet operator kicked offline by shutting down its hosting provider it’s usually not long before the botnet cranks back up with its command-and-control server at a different location, he said. For example, four months after a major botnet hoster, McColo, was shut down in November, the spam volumes were back up to normal levels.
So instead of trying to protect our computers against these people and trying to shutdown their activities, it would make more sense to go after their assets. Take away their homes, furniture, cars, bank accounts, investments and so forth, would get their attention.
What do you think? Isn’t it time that we go after these people who threaten our financial well being?
Comments welcome.
One Comment
JoWazzoo
April 24th, 2009
at 4:27am
Remember how they got Al Capone :-)) Seems to me that RICO could be used as is right now. But then, wtfdik.
Ya know, it is not just botnets per se. As someone who has been involved in net abuse issues for a lonnnnngggg time, what is happening to/on the net regarding all of the various malwares is unbelieveable. Shocking!
Now I do not beleive the value used, but an article in USAToday provided some interesting info on botnets. It said that 40 % of the machines on the net right now are part of botnets. Like I said, that is bs. But even if 4 % were part of botnets, wouldn’t that be shocking given the “quality” of today’s bot malware?
BTW - the hover/link spam. [Yo - Chris that stuff p$#%^ off a lot of people.] I wanted a link to the CNet article, but only an ad there. I know that it was double underlined, but much of this hover crap now is a single underline.
BTW 2 - What do I think? I think you are a good writer and I have read your stuff for some time. Always on the mark.