Writer in Residence - Cornwall

Infosecurity is once again taking place in Olympia London and I've relocated myself away from the sea to the edges of Hyde Park for the three days. I took the sleeper from Truro to arrive in time for Tuesday morning's breakfast meeting and presentation by Bruce Schneier, Information Security guru and founder/CTO of Counterpane. Apart from giving away copies of his book - Beyond Fear - a look at security from a more measured standpoint away from the usual hype that comes from the security vendors (most of whom are here and hyping the magic that they can do). Bruce noted that much of cyber crime - hacking, viruses and worms, spam and spyware come through criminally controlled bot nets - groups of compromised home and small business PCs whose security was either non existent or out of date. Question is how do we eliminate the problem. Education of users has been mooted, but who should do this and how would it be funded? The metaphor often used is the Driving Test for motor vehicles but could that sort of operation work - and would it improve things? Schneier points out that problems arise when home users take to the internet and that they do that through ISPs. Some ISPs offer spam/virus/spyware checking currently and most don't. If they all did, maybe we could deal with the problem.

However, as we have seen many times before, solving one problenm simply sends the vast army of very clever individuals out to find a new way of making money out of the dark side of the net. Happy surfing.