[trotsky]

There is a considerable amount of intelligence that continues to be gathered in the private sector about exploit authors, chinese hacking groups, and the actors involved in ongoing intrusions. Many of these groups conduct a fair amount of discussion and training pretty out in the open, confident of their status as out of the reach of western justice. Specific techniques and code present in a pair of Adobe 0-days used this spring point very loudly back to one collective and probably one or two specific actors that talk about these techniques in public in person. There are strong rumors that the night dragon intrusions track back to a specific actor. I've seen private investigator reports tailing specific intruders who verify that monitored intrusions happen reliably just minutes after people they have full dossiers on show up at their office. With many intrusions it's clear that the long term hosts are complicit in the bahvior. The wall of proxies defense tends to or at least can fall down against determined back hacking of the client.

All of these circumstances may not be the norm, but they exist. More would exist if there were more incentives to develop this kind of intelligence. The basic problem now is OK - what do you do with that info? NSA offensive security practices are not built for or available to the private sector. However, it seems very possible that these individual actors could be dissuaded, harassed, redirected or worse given the right program.

I'm not speaking of a state vs. state MAD. Perhaps I used the wrong term. But, even though I'm not a gun fan, there must be something to the idea that your neighbors may be less likely to break into your house if everyone knows you own a gun and you live somewhere you can shoot an intruder.