I will never understand why there isn’t an international law enforcement agency with teeth, which can get rid of the bad actors.
You'd also need to have every country not actively involved in these types of schemes yet we know some governments are directly benefiting from the scams/theft their citizens are perpetrating.
You'd also need to have every country think the things you want to police against are wrong. Again, we know that's just not true.
Your administration then made copyright law changes a central goal of many agreements - essentially a non-negotiable requirement for say a trade agreement to proceed.
I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Careful what you wish for. Before you know it you can't have an IP without your ID.
But who will suppress attempts to go beyond the blackwall then?
They've never been expected to "stamp out" those things, any more than a city police department is expected to stamp out all crime and doctors are expected to stamp out all illness. Their mission is to reduce those things:
For warfare, they have been extremely successful relative to human history. War has actually become taboo and illegal, and very few happen. Look at history before the UN - it's a miracle. Think of the vision and confidence of people who, looking at 10,000 years of human history, immediately after two world wars, thought it was even possible, came up with effective strategy, did the hard work, and accomplished it.
I don't know the details of the other fields.
> I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.
Politics and funding, and corruption, come with every human institution over a certain size, and especially with governments which can't exclude undesireable people: Democratic governments are the least corrupt, but if the people elect a corrupt representative or executive, then nobody can kick them out (unless they commit prosecutable crimes). And now imagine an association or confederation of governments, which is what the UN is.
So yes, the goal is to make something better. Otherwise, we might as well quit on everything.
Law enforcement takes time. The perpetrators of these attacks aren't hanging out in the open with their full names shielded only by the hope that their country won't extradite for political favor.
By the time the perpetrators are identified and a case is built, getting them charged isn't bottlenecked on the lack of an international agency. Any international law enforcement agency would be beholden to each country's own political wills and ideals, meaning any "teeth" they had would be no more effective than what we currenly have for extraditing people or cooperating with foreign police organizations.
Tangential: once I was targeted by a pretty primitive scam. More than 10 years ago (after someone I love was naive and inexperienced, having a medium amount stolen in a sensitive and stressful time of this person's life). I recognised fast and having time and will I sarted to play along, pretending I bite the bait. Collecting info while acting. In parallel trying to connect local and international authorities to report an ongoing scam effort. I believe I tried 4 organizations in 3 different countries apparently involved, I believe one was dedicated to online scams, also trying to warn Western Union, they are about to be used for scam. I even went personally to a police station locally to get some advice on how to assist catching the criminals. Since all I encountered insisted to report my damages, so they could start an investigation on an actual loss happened, I furiously gave up and decided whenever I will be having financial trouble I will invest my efforts in scamming others. No-one cares catching those in act! So the thugs can be incredibly bold and dumb, like the one I encountered, it is no effort doing better.
Some sort of international clearing house for ISPs to help identify and sequester compromised customers might be nice, too; but that doesn't need law enforcement powers; and maybe it already exists?
But here we are in 2025 still running IPv4 with CGNAT, so we can't.
CGNATs reuse IPs so any IP block rule fairly quickly becomes somebody else's IP that you shouldn't be blocking.
If, however, you use IPv6, you don't need CGNAT and, while addresses may change, a blocked address won't suddenly get recycled to an unsuspecting user. In addition, if the allocation is static, you can block the whole network range and the problematic devices can't change their allocation sufficiently to escape the IP block.
What I'd love to see is a service where websites could report abuse to ISPs, who would then take the misbehaving customers offline, until their system or behavior is fixed. Right now there's zero incentives to take customers offline, neither for ISP, nor cloud providers.
Companies don't seem to have a tough time managing the blocks for all the various ranges of all the VPS providers to prevent you from using VPNs to access their services. Somehow, I don't think blocking 500,000 IPs is a technical problem.
I also suspect that once you start getting effective IP blocking, that 500,000 number will drop quite rapidly as it simply won't be so profitable to commandeer a device.
> What I'd love to see is a service where websites could report abuse to ISPs, who would then take the misbehaving customers offline, until their system or behavior is fixed.
IPv4 CGNAT is part of that problem, too. Because of CGNAT, the offending IPs get "tumbled" and are more difficult to identify from outside the ISP. Consequently, it makes it difficult to punish the ISPs. Without IPv4 CGNAT, those IPs are more stable over time and can be identified outside the ISP boundary. If ISPs start losing customers because everybody in the universe has blocked various ranges, the ISPs will start blocking devices at origin.
I was under the impression that these botnets still rely on vulnerable computers, which have a human that will be calling support asking for the issue to be resolved.
Then it needs an ISP to figure out the issue and ask the client to sort out their compromised computer, but unlikely the ISP will stop a paying customer from internet access especially if it's not clear why their original assigned IPv6 is blocked.
but these bad actors are not possible to track down in the first place since internet is unfortunately decentralized and things as simple as transactions submitted to bitcoin or etherium blockchain can be used as c&c
Borders currently get in the way but we needn't have law enforcement on foreign soil to solve that. Exchanging information and reliably acting upon it could be all these agencies need to do in their respective countries. When this proves effective aside from crime states that have no interest in upholding even their own laws (since dual illegality would probably be a prerequisite for any of this), they may eventually find themselves increasingly cut off and distrusted until they, too, cooperate or self-isolate like NK
for at least 6 months
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785n9pexjpo
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/new-york-resident-pl...
Literally the same as economic sanctions. The internet is a network of peers “trading” bits and bytes after all.
North Korea doesn't care if you limit their internet they already allow people to go outside their own.
Just not enough economic or political incentive to pay for it.
> This won't do anything. The attacks are not from the offending countries they're from botnets of compromised devices.
> It's not changing the goalpost.
fuck off.
They have a fundamentally different government and social model, basically a one person dictatorship that feels the need to micromanage and control their populace.
They absolutely love seeing democracy and businesses associated with it fail because it reinforces their perspective of the CCP model being superior and thus strengthens their perceived legitimacy (or even inevitability) of CCP control over China.
It is China's national interests to see a stable America that can continue to maintain the post WWII world order that benefited China so much for so long. Without the US, who is going to maintain peace in the middle east, Africa and other places? without such peace, how could China export its goods and services?
"West" != America.
Your claim also implies that China and Russia are operating on the same level. That is laughable at best - Russia is a failed rogue state with the economic size comparable only to a Chinese province, it is left behind in ALL modern techs and its military hardware are aging fast. It is the complete opposite of the path took by China.
You mean Team America, World Police?
Besides the fact that not much happens in the international public sector, law enforcement is more about deterrence than prevention. Criminals aren't deterred by law enforcement, so the bad actors never stop. Human nature's a bitch.
If they did focus on prevention instead, most of this could be... prevented. Create a treaty that mandates how critical infrastructure technology is created/sold. Consumer routers will stop being shit at security, and home devices are slowed-down in upstream spamming. That's a good chunk of the denial-of-service market gone, with no need to police the world.
...but the criminals are smart and intentionally avoid attacking the powerful, so nobody cares. Same reason organized crime still exists. It's poor people caught up in gang violence and crime, not rich people, so it persists.
edit: grammar
That's the trick. A lot of countries bill calls to cell phones at 10 cents a minute; in the US, calling is near zero cost. The US makes a great market for scammers to target because of low operating costs, penetration of globally usable payment cards, minimal language diversity.
Of course, these scams are forbidden by law, but that doesn't change the economics. Very few scam shops get busted; especially when most of them run from outside the US. STIR/SHAKEN helps a bit, but not much... without a effective mechanism to report unwanted calls that leads to those callers being ejected from the network as well as ejecting providers that are unresponsive to reports, there's not really hope of progress.
For a few reasons (political, economical) there’s little will to enact them, these attacks are so few and far between and you can pay your way out of them in most cases, so the incentives aren’t there for ISPs (whom are a commodity judged primarily on price and bandwidth)
You detect the behaviour downstream and send a signal to the ISP that there is traffic that needs to he rate limited.
One mechanism for this is called RTBH (Remote Triggered BlackHole) which relies on community tagged prefixes of addresses exceeding rate limited to be blackholed from forwarding traffic further in to the internet.
There’s also things like flowspec but a lot of things rely on proper trust between ASNs.
When I was running servers that would routinely attract DDoSed at ~ 10 Gbps, I ended up always running a low sample rate packet capture. Anytime I noticed a DDoS, I could go and look at the packets. If you've got connectivity to sink and measure 15 Tbps of DDoS, you can probably influence your providers to take some sampled packet captures and look at them too.
Even without clear information from packet captures, 15 Tbps is going to make an impact on traffic graphs, and you can figure out sources from those, although it might be a bit tricky because the attack duration was reported at only 40 seconds, so if someone only has hourly stats, it might be too small to be noticed; but once a minute stats are pretty common.
But as the sibling mentioned, even with spoofing, you can still follow the packet trail from your border routers upstream. I think the main thing we are lacking is just responsibility on the ISP side, if someone reaches out complaining that half of your customers are sending ddos attacks, maybe you need to do something about it. Most of these huge attacks are compromised routers or IoT devices (remember Mirai Botnet?).
There's layer upon layer of relays now, and meshed C2C networks.
Lots of DNS fastflux too