Re: Recent Attacks

["Paul D. Robertson" <proberts () clark net>]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Ryan Russell wrote:

> > And E-trade, where *timing* matters a lot to their customers?
> >
> >             --Steve Bellovin
>
> For E-trade, it makes a lot more sense that business would be lost that
> would happen then and only then (well, mostly... I'm sure some folks will
> still sell even after the stock dropped below what they meant to sell at.)

But then the damages aren't just to E*Trade, they're to their customers
too.  Even if they still sell, they've lost real money.

> It makes sense to punish the attacker exta on behalf of the customers of
> E-trade *IFF* E-Trade does something along those lines for normal outages.

Why the if?  The law shouldn't care about "normal" policy, it should care
about the results of the illegal action.

> (I think they've had some, and I don't think they did anything for the
> customers, did they?  Hmm..lesse, our click-wrap agreement says "Screw
> You.")

Irrelevent under the law as I understand it (which isn't all that well I
suppose.)

> 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.   

Bad market day, people trying to get out of positions at pre-set ammounts
or as soon as possible - yeah, 1.2B isn't that difficult to reach in those
conditions.

> If someone decides that mapping out the Internet to produce nice-looking
> graphs constitutes a criminal port-scanning attack, you would want to have
> someone force the prosecutors to name reasonable damages, right?  You

(You're picking on the wrong one.)

Paul
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Robertson      "My statements in this message are personal opinions
proberts () clark net      which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."
                                                                     PSB#9280