Re: IT Underground trip report

[Florian Weimer <fw () deneb enyo de>]

* Dave Aitel:

> One weird statistic he posed is that ``50% of all corporations have 
> "offensive attack programs" ready to use." He claims a large percentage 
> of them are ``hacking back". I don't see it. I think some of them are 
> hiring outside companies that do DoS attacks on phishing companies, but 
> I don't see a ``hack back" strategy.

Some data collection and data sharing efforts border on the illegal.
Depending on how broad you define "hacking", this could qualify as
"hacking back".  Some of this stuff scales quite neatly, too.
Obviously, hardly anybody bothers with cracking individual
machines. 8-)

> Religious wars are not between nation states, they are fundamentally
> between ideologies.

I don't think we have the necessary data to tell if this is true.
Future historians might get an insight, but it's hard to get a clear
perspective right now.  If we look back at history, religious wars
have never been about religion, religion has always been used as a
mobilizing force.  OTOH, our historians so far have mostly been
interested in wars which our ancestors were involved in (mainly as
agressors, of course), so our historical perspective is certainly
biased.

> Most nation-states have little if any political legitimacy in the
> modern world, so a trend towards non-nation-state warfare makes more
> sense now than ever.

Well, you simply engage in trade wars, or apply cold war technology on
some of your allies for economic gain.  Real war doesn't pay off these
days.
_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://www.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave