Re: What would you tell the White House?

[Paul Ferguson <ferguson () cisco com>]

At 04:15 PM 02/13/2000 -0800, Sean Donelan wrote:

> If you had the opportunity, what would you tell the politicans?  Try to
> avoid technical jargon.  Imagine someone from the Old Executive Office
> Building is reading this list and will need to summarize the suggestions.

What else is there to say? Other than vendors, engineers, and smart
people everywhere are working diligently with their customers,
and within the Internet Service Provider community and
Internet community at-large, to help:

 o Mitigate these attacks,
 o Develop ways to prevent them in the future,
 o Develop ways to help service providers & law
   enforcement identify & prosecute the perpetrators,
 o Help identify ways to strengthen their products
   and even deficiencies in the Internet Protocol suite,

...and help make the Internet a better place for e-commerce,
etc., to flourish.

I think I would also reiterate that no one is particularly
at fault in these recent attacks, its just that the Internet
was designed to be "open" and, as such, the underlying protocols
were never really designed to resist exploits like the ones
we have seen recently. It is a community problem, and it is
important that we, as a community, do not overreact.

- paul