Lecture 11

--Gorchard 09:47, 10 November 2005 (PST) For the first time, I came out of the lectures last night with a sense of optimism. I thought the first two speakers especially (Dave Aucsmith and Steve Gribble) painted a picture that managing nefarious internet activity is possible and already well under way. We seem to have a pretty good understanding of how these guys operate, and it's comforting to know that the people making the attacks are not actually clever enough to discover the vulnerabilities themselves. They also make mistakes like URL typos and allowing themselves to be tracked down through Watson reports. It seems we're not fighting a losing battle. I also found it reassuring to hear Steve Gribble's spyware statistics - that only a small percentage of spyware programs actually do really bad things like keystroke monitoring and calling expensive toll numbers, while most spyware busies itself with 'harmless' activites such as pop-up ads or browser hijacking.