Dogs, Street Children and Hackers

Is that the name of the newest pop group? No, it's how Varujan Pambuccian, Romanian lawmaker and former programmer, describes his country in this article on Romanian hackers. I've tangled with these guys before, but it sounds like their country's officials are cracking down. From the story:

"Computer crime flourished in Romania because the country lacked a cybercrime law until earlier this year, when it enacted what may be the world's harshest. The new law punishes convicts with up to 15 years in prison — more than twice the maximum for rape.

Varujan Pambuccian, a lawmaker and former programmer, helped draft the new law after Romania's government realized the nation, which is racing to join the European Union by 2007, was getting a bad online reputation.

'We want a good name for our country,' he said. 'I'm very angry that Romania is so well-known for ugly things — for street dogs, street children and hackers.' Pambuccian said there was a noticeable decline in criminal activity in the first three months since the law took effect.

More than 60 Romanians have been arrested in recent joint operations involving the FBI, Secret Service, Scotland Yard, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and numerous European police agencies."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more