Cisco, others plan to ban insecure PCs

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Wrong Focus

As usual the network people see a problem on the network and try to claim the solution is to force all the users to be immune. They're the network people - shouldn't they be looking for ways to block the abuse? It is of course true that if every system is immune to every exploit then it doesn't matter it the network allows all the abuse to enter. When is it actually likely that it will be possible ot make every system immune to every exploit all the time? Yet that's the solution they espouse. They need do nothing to protct against abuse from outside: the task is to force everyone inside to secure their systems.

Note also the punitive and judgmental nature of the action. They aren't committing themselves to helping users secure their systems, they're setting themselves up as judges of who may and who may not use the network - someone else has the job of solving the problem. Cisco will help the network experts assert their superioty to everyone else. What happens when the CEO's portable is denied access? Then, of course, somebody will scramble to get that portable secured. Why is the intent one of waiting until an attempt is made to connect a possibly insecure system beofre anyone will act? If there is a problem shouldn't the focus be on solving the problem as soon as possible?

The vulnerability starts with a lousy system design. Putting more bad design on top of that yields: a worse desisgn. Or have the old truths now been repealed?

P.S. When it comes to the spam problem the network people have been stultifyingly dense about what they could do to end spam. When there are millions of network abuse events each day that are all ultimately traceable back to a spammer's IP it is shocking how little the network people do - when it's incredibly easy to act. Nope: that, too, is somebody else's problem: the network people just issue pronouncements about how terrible it is that so many systems are insecure.

Posted by: Minas Beede   Posted on: 11/18/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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