4 ms·

I think this is a great idea, young people will always push the envelope in terms of risky behaviour. A 'scare' with a structured process that includes mentors

by icu 7y ago

I think this is a great idea, young people will always push the envelope in terms of risky behaviour. A 'scare' with a structured process that includes mentorship could harnesses a young hacking talent and be positive outcome for the youngster and society in general. Over the long term I wonder if this will give Europe an edge in cybersecurity relative to the US?

adventured 7y ago
> Over the long term I wonder if this will give Europe an edge in cybersecurity relative to the US? No. The headline is misleading. This isn't "Europe" doing it (as though Europe were uniform, rather than wildly different from Germany to Lithuania to Bulgaria to Russia to Italy to Spain to Belarus). The article is pitching an artificially wide premise, as a form of clickbait. It's not "European authorities," it's police in the UK and Netherlands. It won't make any consequential difference at a global industrial scale. $1 trillion in venture capital - leading to the creation of the largest cybersecurity tech companies - every 10 years and paying extremely high salaries to attract the best talent, is all that moves the needle on cybersecurity. Everything else is a blip at best. On what matters, Western Europe - Europe as a whole in fact, the rest of Europe is even further behind - can't or won't compete, save for a few rare exceptions. Only the US and China are on the field. Everybody else is watching from the sidelines.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I think you have a point. Perhaps it's because folks could be skeptical that $1T will lead to the the creation of next gen good cybersecurity tech companies rather than abject cash grabs that ultimately fail. Regardless, infrastructural tooling for usable organizational and societal level security is still not where it could be, and I don't know what it will take to get it there. Just throwing a wild gut feeling out there, it feels a bit like healthcare to me. There needs to be some kind of standardization and some kind of a standards body (likely governmental) that coordinates security as if it's an existential societal risk if done poorly, in the same way that epidemiology is done with respect to public health. Security hygiene and literacy needs to become a basic part of societal culture for any of this to change; not just that, but catastrophic adverse events that occur as a result of infosec braches ought to be rectified more thoroughly, and insurance taken out to fully indemnify against them. I don't see any of that happening, so I don't really see the foundation for any change towards a more digitally secure society. I hope I'm wrong.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > Only the US and China are on the field Is this really the case? Most of what I see in US news is how yet another adolescent or teenage hacker was caught and faced stiff penalties and consequences, far out of balance to what the hacker actually did to make an example of him. If there's a thriving cybersecurity scene in the US, I'd say it's largely due to the private sector and not anything the US government or any of its institutions (on a federal or state or local level) have done to encourage exploration into hacking. Which is unfortunate, because it's increasingly an important topic in the modern environment.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  So you’re looking into investing at a rate equal to the total VC funding in Silicon Valley?
microcolonel 7y ago
As far as I'm aware, a lot of former black hats who are not sociopaths end up in the private sector.
alt_f4 7y ago
> Over the long term I wonder if this will give Europe an edge in cybersecurity relative to the US? It won't because the article is misleading wrt to the "European" approach, in that, there is no such agreed EU-wide approach. For example, this bit below: > Bulgarian police last week released a 20-year-old security specialist accused of hacking the country’s National Revenue Agency, and accessing information about 5 million people, most of Bulgaria’s population is actually just false. Bulgarian police released the guy on bail and then proceeded to charge him with cyber terrorism (15 years in prison). They also arrested his supervisor, issued a European Arrest Warrant for owner of the company he works for (who is apparently abroad on unrelated business) and raided the offices of the company, taking all computers and IT equipment and essentially destroying the business. It's currently unclear on what evidence they decided to nuke the company.
tootahe45 7y ago
The people this has been aimed at are those who pay $10 a month to boot someone's ip offline or to buy some half-assed malware program (most don't manage to even do the payment without getting caught, see link), so it's not exactly Einstein we're saving from prison time here. https://www.cbronline.com/news/webstresser-arrests-interpol https://www.cbronline.com/news/webstresser-arrests-interpol

by icu 7y ago

adventured 7y ago

> Over the long term I wonder if this will give Europe an edge in cybersecurity relative to the US? No. The headline is misleading. This isn't "Europe" doing it (as though Europe were uniform, rather than wildly different from Germany to Lithuania to Bulgaria to Russia to Italy to Spain to Belarus). The article is pitching an artificially wide premise, as a form of clickbait. It's not "European authorities," it's police in the UK and Netherlands. It won't make any consequential difference at a global industrial scale. $1 trillion in venture capital - leading to the creation of the largest cybersecurity tech companies - every 10 years and paying extremely high salaries to attract the best talent, is all that moves the needle on cybersecurity. Everything else is a blip at best. On what matters, Western Europe - Europe as a whole in fact, the rest of Europe is even further behind - can't or won't compete, save for a few rare exceptions. Only the US and China are on the field. Everybody else is watching from the sidelines.

yowlingcat 7y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, I think you have a point. Perhaps it's because folks could be skeptical that $1T will lead to the the creation of next gen good cybersecurity tech companies rather than abject cash grabs that ultimately fail. Regardless, infrastructural tooling for usable organizational and societal level security is still not where it could be, and I don't know what it will take to get it there. Just throwing a wild gut feeling out there, it feels a bit like healthcare to me. There needs to be some kind of standardization and some kind of a standards body (likely governmental) that coordinates security as if it's an existential societal risk if done poorly, in the same way that epidemiology is done with respect to public health. Security hygiene and literacy needs to become a basic part of societal culture for any of this to change; not just that, but catastrophic adverse events that occur as a result of infosec braches ought to be rectified more thoroughly, and insurance taken out to fully indemnify against them. I don't see any of that happening, so I don't really see the foundation for any change towards a more digitally secure society. I hope I'm wrong.
jplayer01 7y ago
> Only the US and China are on the field Is this really the case? Most of what I see in US news is how yet another adolescent or teenage hacker was caught and faced stiff penalties and consequences, far out of balance to what the hacker actually did to make an example of him. If there's a thriving cybersecurity scene in the US, I'd say it's largely due to the private sector and not anything the US government or any of its institutions (on a federal or state or local level) have done to encourage exploration into hacking. Which is unfortunate, because it's increasingly an important topic in the modern environment.
saagarjha 7y ago
So you’re looking into investing at a rate equal to the total VC funding in Silicon Valley?

microcolonel 7y ago

As far as I'm aware, a lot of former black hats who are not sociopaths end up in the private sector.

alt_f4 7y ago

> Over the long term I wonder if this will give Europe an edge in cybersecurity relative to the US? It won't because the article is misleading wrt to the "European" approach, in that, there is no such agreed EU-wide approach. For example, this bit below: > Bulgarian police last week released a 20-year-old security specialist accused of hacking the country’s National Revenue Agency, and accessing information about 5 million people, most of Bulgaria’s population is actually just false. Bulgarian police released the guy on bail and then proceeded to charge him with cyber terrorism (15 years in prison). They also arrested his supervisor, issued a European Arrest Warrant for owner of the company he works for (who is apparently abroad on unrelated business) and raided the offices of the company, taking all computers and IT equipment and essentially destroying the business. It's currently unclear on what evidence they decided to nuke the company.

tootahe45 7y ago

The people this has been aimed at are those who pay $10 a month to boot someone's ip offline or to buy some half-assed malware program (most don't manage to even do the payment without getting caught, see link), so it's not exactly Einstein we're saving from prison time here. https://www.cbronline.com/news/webstresser-arrests-interpol https://www.cbronline.com/news/webstresser-arrests-interpol