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Law and disorder in cyberspace

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Cybercrime is on the rise and botnets are largely to blame. Botnets are large groups of computers that spew out spam, worms and viruses. The trouble is that international law can’t keep up with the technology. Correspondent Cyrus Farivar reports.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Recently American and South Korean government websites suffered a series of cyber attacks. Now technically these are known as denial of service attacks. What that means is that thousands of computers around the world are flooding government servers with fake web traffic. While experts know a lot about this type of attack they don’t have a lot of effective strategies to neutralize it. But now some new research may provide answers. Cyrus Farivar reports.

CYRUS FARIVAR: First let’s get the jargon out of the way. That vast network of computers attacking a small set of computers – that’s called a botnet. Botnets work by installing malware, like viruses and worms. Once enough machines are infected they can be turned on at the flick of a switch to say steal credit card data or attack servers. And when botnets attack they’re generally successful.

FELIX LEDER: When you build a botnet there’s not much the defenders can do. From an economic point of view there’s a low chance that the botnet gets taken down so the chance for a high return investment for those people is very high.

FARIVAR: That’s Felix Leder, a PhD student at the University of Bonn in Germany. He’s been exploring ways to stop botnets and recently presented some of his ideas at an international cyber defense conference in Estonia. Leder says that until now the main way to stop a botnet has been to create a sort of digital moat. In other words, pull up the drawbridge and prevent the attacks from reaching your castle.

LEDER: We thought okay let’s try to be the white knight you know just for one botnet.

FARIVAR: That sounds simple. In order to stop a botnet, Leder says, you basically need to co-opt it and use its tactics against itself which in effect makes you a good-guy botnet. And that’s where ethical and legal issues start to pop up according to Leder’s colleague, Tillman Werner.

TILLMAN WERNER: So for instance if you see a botnet attacking your site and you want to take it down for instance by exploiting all the individual machines and installing a removal software then you would execute code on these machines without the user’s permission and this might be okay for Estonia or for one country, for your country, but it would probably be seen as a problem from other countries.

FARIVAR: That’s just one problem. Peter Eckersley can think of others. He’s with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech advocacy group in San Francisco.

PETER ECKERSLEY: There’s a hugely complicated ethical problem about vigilantism as a response. Sure these researchers that you’ve mentioned in Germany may be genuinely well-intentioned and may genuinely have found a flaw in one particular botnet that they think they can use to shut the botnet down but who watches the vigilantes? How do we know that parties like that are actually making the situation better and even have the public’s interest at heart?

FARIVAR: While technical countermeasures continue to be pursued governments around the world are focusing on updating the laws on their books. Estonia’s government suffered a significant cyber attack in 2007. Since then Estonia has strengthened its laws against such crimes says Eneken Tikk. She’s the head of the legal team at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Tallin, Estonia.

ENEKEN TIKK: So what we did we included in our penal code a provision on cyber terrorism, actually improved the existing concept of terrorism by including some wording about cyber crime.

FARIVAR: Tikk admits that there still aren’t many good legal solutions as to how to deal with cyber attacks. Since Estonia was attacked two years ago only one person has been prosecuted and he got away with only a small fine. For The World I’m Cyrus Farivar.

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