Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: Recent Attacks
From: Crispin Cowan <crispin () wirex com>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 17:46:51 +0000
Ryan Russell wrote:
All I want is for prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement to put some intelligent thought into what the damages really were. I still say the attacker couldn't have done 1.2B in damages, and that's the "crucifixtion" dollar amount.
That would be because the attacker(s) did NOT cause $1.2B in damages. According to a press report I read last week (sorry, lost the reference) the total loss of e-business (assuming that transactions that didn't happen due to DDoS are lost instead of delayed) was around $100M. The other $1.1B was "capitalization loss", i.e. blame the total $ value of lowering share prices for the victim .com's on the attackers, ignore any subsequent stock price rebound, and pin that whole $ amount on the attacker(s). I agree, the above math does not make sense. The stock price loss really IS the victim's fault: it's Wall Street telling them they need to clean up their security act, because they are vulnerable. The $100M in lost transaction costs is arguably the attacker's fault, but there is a lot of doubt about how many of those transactions truly evaporated, vs. how many just came back the next day. Caveat: I am not a lawyer, I'm not party to any of these activities, and the above is paraphrased from what I read in the newspaper. Crispin ----- Crispin Cowan, CTO, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com Free Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org JOBS! http://immunix.org/jobs.html
Current thread:
- Re: Recent Attacks, (continued)
- Re: Recent Attacks Barney Wolff (Feb 17)
- Re: Recent Attacks Don Kendrick (Feb 19)
- RE: Recent Attacks Staggs, Michael (Feb 19)
- Re: Recent Attacks Steven M. Bellovin (Feb 19)
- Re: Recent Attacks Transistor Sister (Feb 19)
- Recent Attacks andrew . c . howard (Feb 19)
- Re: Recent Attacks Steven M. Bellovin (Feb 20)
- Re: Recent Attacks Ryan Russell (Feb 19)
- Re: Recent Attacks Paul D. Robertson (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks Ryan Russell (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks Crispin Cowan (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks Ryan Russell (Feb 19)
- RE: Recent Attacks Joseph Judge (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks Randy B. Samos (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks Barrett G. Lyon (Feb 23)
- Re: Recent Attacks Transistor Sister (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks ark (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks ark (Feb 21)
- Re: Recent Attacks daN. (Feb 24)
- Re: Recent Attacks David LeBlanc (Feb 23)
- Re: Recent Attacks blyonpop (Feb 23)
- Re: Recent Attacks ark (Feb 24)