Researcher wants hacker groups hounded mercilessly

Criminal cyber gangs must be harried, hounded and hunted until they’re driven out of business, a noted botnet researcher said today as he prepared to pitch a new anti-malware strategy later this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

“We need a new approach to fighting cybercrime,” said Joe Stewart, the director of SecureWorks Inc.’s counter-threat unit. “What we’re doing now is not making a significant dent.”

Rather than pursue malware makers the old-fashioned way — a tack Stewart argued is haphazard, at best — he said that teams of paid security researchers should be created to stalk and disrupt specific criminal gangs or botnets. Set up like a police department’s major crimes unit or a military special operations team, the researchers would take a long-term view, get to know their target, perhaps even infiltrate the group responsible for the botnet and employ a spectrum of disruptive tactics.

URL: http://www.hackinthebox.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=31001