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by IntronExon 3061 days ago
Many, if not most, crimes go unreported offline. Is it really a shock that the same might be true online? It’s not as though police are likely to find and return your stolen property from a mugging or burglary.

Above all, policing needs “better systems for gathering data,” the report said.

Oooooh. Well that was predictable. Stingrays and lobbying for cryptographic backdoors not enough to do the job hm?
2 comments
MichaelGG 3061 days ago
What's the point of reporting? We had an issue with a sysadmin. Ended up firing him but didn't revoke all his credentials in time. He logged in and deleted all our Azure servers and rm -rf'd our GCP boxes. MS wouldn't help us at all, but Google's console log showed the login from the guy's town. What're we supposed to do? He was in England and we the US.

Had a similar issue with a hacker that found a way around our billing systems. Ran up $90k of charges. He was in Montreal and we even had his ID. What're we gonna do, waste time trying to go after someone that'll claim it was our bug and he didn't know anything was wrong?

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djsumdog 3061 days ago
The US has police relations with both the UK and Canada. When happened when your company tried to contact authorities in those States? It seems like prosecution should be possible, or at least civil liability.
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dTal 3060 days ago
Important lesson: when dealing with a problem sysadmin, revoke their credentials before telling them they're fired.
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logfromblammo 3061 days ago
The only reason I'd report property crime to the cops is because my insurance company makes me do it as part of the claims process.

The cops don't work for us; they work for the Them with a capital 'T'. The only thing that reliably works is best-effort individual defense plus insurance for when that fails. Keep your doors locked and your backups offsite, because chances are good that if anyone breaks in, police investigators won't produce any useful results, ever.

The Warren vs. D.C. decision just confirmed what was already fact.

If you live in the U.S., it is likely that you have lived your entire life such that the number of police encounters you might rate as positive are vastly outweighed by those you saw as negative. That is certainly true for me. At least my encounters have ranged from "unhelpful" to "annoying", rather than from "useless" to "deadly".

What they need is better systems to ensure that they are actually acting in the public interest, instead of like a hostile occupying army.

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