An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support - Fulton Sheen
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McAfee takes the offensive
INSECURITY OUTFIT McAfee has decided it's time to get tough on cybercrime.
We're not sure how McAfee was tackling cybercrime before the publication of its report, "Security Takes the Offensive". Whatever it was doing obviously wasn't enough, given the malware threats out in the wilds of the Internet.
But now the company apparently wants to rebrand itself as a security crusader that wants to take a proactive stance on fighting the evils of cybercrime. With an American football analogy to warm your cockles, McAfee is advising its customers that it's time to switch from defence to offence.
"Cybercriminals prosper because they have very little reason to fear the consequences," said Jeff Green, SVP of McAfee Labs.
"Every time we release a new statistic about the rise in malware it points to our failure as an industry."
McAfee's report recommends that companies align forces and get the authorities in the loop. The report also reckons companies should use hacker techniques to detect bugs in their own products. It also wants The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to provide data on cyber criminals who host malicious websites.
Intelligence should be shared and McAfee wants companies to use "shunts" and "stuns" to incapacitate botnets. It also argued for these tactics to be used as standard practice.
Cybercriminals should be named and shamed while suspected fraud accounts should be frozen first. Lastly, the report wants to educate people on the street so they have malware awareness and can identify risks.
"If we want to stop being victims, then the good guys need to advance security efforts as threats evolve," said David Marcus, director of security research and communications for McAfee Labs. µ
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That's the worrying underlying theme, especially as not exactly a call here for criminal prosecutions, only for more power to be given corporations, but not enough to ever end the problem, thus ensuring continued need for -- and income from -- anti-virus.
It's difficult to avoid seeing a symbiotic relation among *parasites* as are BOTH shadowy criminals and those who "protect" us from them, especially when the primary enabler of malware -- M$ -- is similarly a parasite that creates "new" features only to drive profits, and its incompetence completes the cycle here. In other words, I see M$, McAfee, and outright criminals (that includes gov't!) as having a common interest in ripping off the public.
To quote; '"Every time we release a new statistic about the rise in malware it points to our failure as an industry.""
No it points to the failures in the operating system.