Symantec Attempts Suicide

The big news this week is Symantec's articulation of antivirus futility (see the Register story here).  Given that antivirus is 40% of their business, this is a pretty good attempt at suicide. Especially since their plan going forward is to continue playing defense only:

Symantec will now concentrate on providing business customers with security as a service – tracking intrusions as they occur, advising on the best way to protect data from collection, and finding out who is doing the attacking.

My assertion of their attempted suicide is NOT their disavowal of antivirus products. It's their continuation of a defense-only strategy that would leave any athletic coaches hoarse from screaming epithets peppered with interspecies reproductive suggestions.

Get set for yet another Symantec management shakeup.

 

In 2010, I Predicted Ellison Would Own An NBA Championship Team

Today's Wall Street Journal story (Page B1, below the fold, read yesterday's online WSJ piece here) talked about Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen and Captain of my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League team Larry Ellison putting together a bid to buy the LA Clippers. If the deal goes through, I make another prediction: The Clippers will win the NBA championship within 5 years. Back in October of 2010 I put Ellison into some historical context (read my complete piece here):

Larry is the real-life version of Iron Man Tony Stark. Ellison won the great database wars. This year, he won the America's Cup yacht race. I predict its only a matter of time before he owns an NBA basketball team and leads them to the championship. And one of the greatest moments in any U.S. confirmation hearing would be watching Larry do a Tony Stark in the Senate: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have successfully privatized international cyber security!" Whereupon he will raise his hands in victory and waltz out of the hearing room.

Naturally, Larry wanted to own the Golden State Warriors because they were near his stomping grounds. But his purchase of the Clippers and their LA location is consistent with yet another of my predictions of nearly a year later in October of 2011 (see it here):

So what do my predictive analytics forecast for the head of my Cyber Privateering Fantasy League leader? First, I believe Larry will eventually own an NBA-championship basketball team. Secondly, I predict that Larry will win an academy award as a movie producer. 

In a way, through his children David (executive producer of Ironman II) and Megan (producer of not one but two films nominated for Best Picture this year—Her and American Hustle), Larry has vicariously started his Oscar run. But let there be no doubt that he's in the race to personally take the stage on Oscar night sometime in the next 10 years. Larry plays to win. Whether in the great database wars, the America's Cup yacht race, the NBA, or as I predict, in the movie business. 

This message is brought to you by a mere bystander and part-time follower of a remarkable human specimen named Lawrence J. Ellison. To you doubters of my prediction, I can only say, "What other kind of legacy would you expect of Steve Jobs' best friend?"

Huawei Contemplates Suicide

Last week (see story here), Huawei spokesman Scott Sykes said that proof that they were a spy conduit would be "corporate suicide." Interesting analogy. If my presentation for Black Hat 2014 is accepted, you could well be paying for your own hit man. $1,000,000. I guess if you pay your own hit man, that qualifies as suicide, doesn't it? In my best imitation of Godfatherspeak: "Yo Vinnie, deese guys should ought'ta prepare for a dirt nap."

White House "Thinking" Makes The Best Case for Privatization of Cyber Security

Yesterday's New York Times story (read it here) on White House "thinking" regarding cyber security is absolute proof that privatization is the only workable solution. The net-net seems to be that we can't count on the people protecting our infrastructure to let us know of vulnerabilities and back doors, because those flaws would then be fixed and unavailable to our own spooks:

But  [Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator] spent the rest of his blog entry describing what conditions might lead to a decision not to publish the details of a flaw — perhaps for a short time, perhaps for much longer. “Disclosing a vulnerability can mean that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack, stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks,” Mr. Daniel wrote, describing the review that has taken place at the White House in the past few months.

Makes you feel warm all over. Doesn't it?

A Modest Proposal for Going on the Offensive With Internet Scammers

After dealing with some particularly innovative Internet crooks over the last two weeks, I gave the local ABC affiliate an exclusive on this story:

Click here for text of the interview and the ABC4 airing.

This was basically a scam where I was getting both email and text messages from the scammers. I called the local FBI office to see if they wanted to sting these guys, and they declined. The FBI is far too busy to investigate these things. They suggested I send a report to IC3.GOV, which I did. I then called INTERPOL and got an even less enthusiastic answer. Even the local police were uninterested, although they did give me a case number for my police report (2014002363). One thing is certain: If the email and texts had been about a plot to assassinate the President of the United States, you can be sure the Secret Service would have perp-walked the shackled miscreants out of their homes within 24 hours!

What was NOT covered in the story was my suggestion that viewers text messages to the scammers (hopefully from "burner" phones) with a message like, "The Revolutionary Council has approved your beautiful plan to assassinate POTUS. Destroy your cell phone and go radio silent. God be with you." But interestingly enough, even though they didn't have time to air this part of my plan, the clever reporter did manage to include the scammer's US-based burner cell phone in the story (I added both the UK and US numbers to the video above). Since I have proposals to speak at several upcoming 2014 events, I even fantasized about buying a bunch of burner cell phones with prepaid text minutes and giving them to audience members. My invitation to the burner recipients would have been to send a "We approve your plan to kill the president…" message to the first scammer dumb enough to text them, and then toss the free phone into the bushes outside the house of a white supremacist. Of course, I plagiarized from my novel Daddy's Little Felons, so you might say I had this in my planned bag of tricks all along. Excerpting from my novel:

I launched a pre-emptive peer-to-peer command that sent an email in perfect Arabic to his entire address book using quotes from Surahs number 4 and 7 in the Koran as proof that Mohammed was a Satan worshiper and romantically inclined toward swine…My software then erased any trace of itself on his system, after first verifying that the mail had been sent, spectacularly destroying his operating system, and finally displaying the image of a pig on his screen. 

This trick really upped my game, even exceeding the nasty I unleashed on an Internet scammer who was using a burner cell phone to swindle an elderly friend of mine. Rather than go to the trouble of tracking down the scammer, I just sent him a text message from my own untraceable burner. It read: “The Revolutionary Council has approved your excellent plan to kill POTUS. Radio silence from now on. God be with you.” Within twenty-four hours—thanks to the NSA snooping apparatus—the Secret Service descended on the poor devil who, as it turned out, lived just two doors down from my dear friend. Our last vision of him was his being perp-walked in shackles to a SWAT van, followed by agents hauling his computers and file cabinets. Naturally, I immediately disposed of my burner. Chances are, my Internet scammer had a much easier time explaining the text message about assassinating the president (POTUS) to the Secret Service than my Saudi hacker would have justifying his rash email.

But no, above isn't my "modest proposal."

My Modest Proposal

I understand that the FBI and Homeland Security can't possibly investigate all the scams and frauds being perpetrated by international crooks. But why not randomly identify an in-process fraud scheme and marshal the resources (FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, and INTERPOL) to publicly take down the culprits. You're got to believe that this would put a check in the swing of bad guys worldwide.

Can't we FOR ONCE go on the offensive and quit our defense-only mentality dictated by US Cyberlaw? This notion is humbly submitted by a mere pawn in the international game of cybercrookery.

Oh, and by the way. If you want to have some fun with the cyber scammer, here are their (probably burner) cell phone numbers:

UK cell phone:  011-44-7417-403532

US-based cell phone: 646-751-0521

Selah.