Contributor

Vladuz goes down. A case study for corporate activism.

Opinion
Apr 23, 20082 mins

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.

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.

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