Vladuz goes down. A case study for corporate activism.

I am in Nampa, Idaho today outside Boise.  My topic is The Cyber Crime Scenario where I build off of a ten minute presentation I first gave at Network World’s Security Standard event in Boston. The topic then was the Doomsday scenario.  In my Cyber Crime Scenario I propose the logical extension of what we see today continuing unimpeded.  There are only two inhibiters to the rise of cyber crime that I can identify. One is better security, thus the security industry.  The other is international cooperation of law enforcement agencies.

Cross jurisdictional cooperation of law enforcement agencies is a rare occurrence.   Dave Cullinane, CISO of eBay is the keynote presenter here at the sixth annual Boise ISSA security conference.  He described a just completed investigation instigated by eBay against a Romanian hacker who was penetrating their systems and bragging about it.  Well, on April 18, Romanian police busted in to the apartment of Vladuz, aka Vlad Constantin Duiculescu  and arrested him .  See the video.

Remember the bounties Microsoft offered for catching virus writers? That was successful too.

Chalk one up for the good guys!  But here is my question: Is it really eBay’s and Microsoft’s job to track these guys down?  While great, that does not scale down to the small enterprise or individual that fall prey to bad guys.