Much like the War on Drugs or even the War on Terror, the inability of the American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) government and Federal law enforcement bodies to quell the onslaught of hacker attacks points to a larger systemic issue: the inability to combat decentralized opponents. Sure it may seem like good news when the FBI reports it has snagged the leader of the hacker commune LulzSec (followed by the revelation that he was a FBI informant anyways), but such arrests have done little to stop the brazen digital vigilantes.
The problem with fighting such decentralized adversaries is that they don’t need traditional leadership structures to operate, and even if there is a leader at the top of the chain, like in the case of LulzSec, I would guess that there are always two or three other hackers ready to take on his role immediately following his downfall. So just how bad is the hacker epidemic?
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal Shawn Henry, the FBI’s top cyber cop, offered his own grim assessment of the situation, stating that “we’re not winning” the war against hackers and the current methods employed to fight cyber-crime are outdated and “unsustainable.”
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