Crooks slither into Net's shady nooks and crannies

Date: October 21, 2004
Source: USA Today
By: Jon Swartz

... more out of control," says Rep. Thornberry, co-author of a bill to create a high-ranking position in the Department of Homeland Security. The assistant secretary of cybersecurity would coordinate cybercrime busting with private industry and state and local governments. (Amit Yoran, the nation's cybersecurity chief, abruptly resigned Oct. 1, after a year. He quit, industry observers said, over what he considered a lack of attention paid to cybersecurity within the department.)

And it shouldn't stop there, says Thornberry, who advocates tax incentives and liability protection for corporations that "beef up" cybersecurity. "Threats and vulnerabilities change in a matter of seconds," he says. "Defenses are obsolete unless they're constantly improved."

Whether any of the bills make a dent as law is debatable, given the mixed results of the national Can-Spam law. About three-fourths of e-mail monitored in September by e-mail-security company Postini was spam. The law has had another unintended result: Spam operators have fled the USA for China and Korea, where they continue to inundate Americans with e-mail for porn and "miracle" drugs.

"The reality is we are just the U.S., and there are nearly 200 countries connected to the Internet. Our laws stop at the border," says Jody Westby, a managing director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' security and privacy practice.

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