Kaspersky puts the willies up the web

LAST YEAR, Eugene Kaspersky CEO of Russia’s Anti-Virus company Kaspersky labs was to be guest speaker at the Infosec IT security show in London. He didn't make it. 

Luckily Kespersky made it into town for this year's show and sat down with the INQ to bemoan the state of  Internet security.

Kaspersky highlighted what a state the world’s Internet is in, how unsecure the Internet really is, what can really be done to make it secure, along with who needs to get the ball rolling and how long it will take.

He reckons cyber-terrorists are all too confident today, also the police aren’t as effective as they could be, seeing there are no borders to the online worlds.  This makes it difficult to know how widespread these cyber terrorists really are across the multiple regions they reign in.

There is so much red tape in the way today between country to country he said, it’s very difficult to police these different regions all together.

He also believes the financial crises we are in will stimulate criminailty even more and with the global economy depending on the Internet, everyone’s at risk. Stark words indeed.

Kaspersky says all these networks were insecure from the start, due to the very nature of how they were established, from the days of ARPA way back when, with academics and the military thought to be the only ones using it. Eugene thinks this is the one of the underlying faults, which is a very big part of the problem and needs to change.

He said it’s now become very serious, with major businesses connected to the network and how vulnerable they really are – all of which has been seen in recent attacks.

The likes of Conficker, with over 10 million botnet attacks finally made governments pay attention.  It was a very well-orchestrated organised attack.  Kaspersky  said this made governments finally realise there’s a problem, with network security and what they need to do to address it.

He believes they now need to take control of the Internet no more so than right now.  He aired some ideas from the likes of Internet passports for users, a possible Internet Interpol organisation needing to be in place to take control.

This is his major idea which he was currently airing to all those that would take notice. It’s something he has been talking about for the last six or seven years.

Apparently, governments have now taken notice, although the implementation of this he believes will take another 10 to 20 years. In the government’s eye, that time period isn’t all that long, with all the bureaucracy a large movement will entail.     

Kaspersky sees his role as an advisor on this movement, that’s all. No credit to be taken in his name, only to help from the insight he has gained in all his years as a security consultant on this very matter. This makes perfect sense. Who else would you want to back a major change and aid than someone who deals with this day in, day out along with being irked by the problems too along with being able to test out these practices.

He does believe any new measures will never be 100 per cent secure, but it’ll be a start in the right direction. They will stop most, but there will always be some people professional enough to bypass these regulations and reek havoc. His main goal is to protect against the 1000s of criminals, not the 100s.

Governments need to put these measures in place he firmly believes, but first of all they need to start talking to each other – which has always been in the past a major problem. Without these organisations sitting down and starting to air their differences, seeing what the common problems are there is no way any type of resolutions will be on the cards any time soon.

Kaspersky thought perhaps the likes of the United Nations could get involved. Although it might take another attack as large and as potentially damaging as Conficker, to make them all finally start to get the ball rolling or at least make a firm move in the right direction.

Another factor he believes which could deter cyber criminals is a higher risk of arrest. The possibility of a larger sentence or greater monetary fine could be imposed, as a result of their activities.  

Possible accreditations for businesses and organisations, network providers and ISPs, with the likes of logging some basic data on activity to help the police if they called could help on this fight Eugene believes.  

There has been a move to begin the Internet Interpol, which has been aired and discussed at the recent Convention of Cyber Crime, stated Kaspersky. Organisations like IMPACT have started very projects that look very much like this and how it could proceed.

The more recent move for ISPs to hold data on user’s online activity is one move to design a more secure internet, the UK has started this just as the Netherlands have all with much controversy attached.

Kaspersky has already spoken to some people in influence to start all these practices along with the procedures of designing a more secure internet. He mentioned a few Lords in the Houses of Parliament, people in the European Parliament and The Unites States government – all of which agreed the problem was serious.

In closing, he said a rather insightful and home-hitting truism: "Humans are humans, they won’t make a move until there’s a serious incident"

Think of all the large disasters in human history and the preventions that are in place after they happened. Something needs to happen now, before it’s all too late and it’s just an afterthought rather than a preventive measure for next time. µ