Oct
6
For those who enjoy a good tech yarn, you might go pick up a copy of the recently-released The Best of Technology Writing 2006. Edited by my fellow Wired contributor Brendan Koerner, it is (as the title implies) a collection of technology-related pieces penned last year by some top-notch writers like Steven Johnson and Clive Thompson…and by some other writers like me, in the form of my New Yorker piece on cyberextortion. (see UPDATE 2, below)
Coincidentally, I just found out from a source that Ivan Maksakov, the Russian student who carried out many of the distributed denial of service (or zombie) attacks described in the story, was recently sentenced to eight years in Russian prison. Two of his co-conspirators received the same sentence, and other members of the group were never found.
So is eight years a just punishment for a kid who, from his bedroom in Saratov, Russia, helped a larger gang extort millions of dollars from companies around the world? Or is he being made an unfair example of, by Russian authorities desperate to show that they are tackling their cybercrime problem? I dropped a note to Barrett Lyon, the founder of Prolexic, the company profiled in the story defending other outfits against such attacks (Lyon has since moved on to start a new firm, BitGravity, building online video distribution software). Lyon and his colleagues spent months in an all-consuming cat and mouse game with Maksakov, eventually helping the authorities track him down and arrest him. “I’m not sure,” he said when I asked him whether the sentence is justified. “I’m still struggling with it.”
UPDATE: Here’s a story about the sentencing.
UPDATE 2: For some reason the anthology removed all the section breaks from the New Yorker story, making it read rather poorly. So if you do want to read it, better to do so online.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006
del.icio.us Digg RedditComments
Leave a Reply