Dodgy IoT devices will be the end of us all.
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I see no issue in handing out similar punishments in the digital space. The Internet is a shared medium, everyone who connects to it has a responsibility to not be a nuisance to others.
The main ingredient of crime is intent, whatever you say. A smaller ingredient can be recklessness, but maybe it's the ISPs sending all those millions of empty packets to a single server that should start feeling some heat ?
Yeah, not kill, but participating in a DDoS against a heavily frequented commercial site that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue a minute, that's still some substantial damage.
In the end it should boil down to the ability of holding the seller of the product with security issues accountable for the damages, and the seller in turn can hold the manufacturer accountable. Maybe that will lead to some substantial change.
A person who buy all reason has absolutely no idea how any of this shit works. If you wanna go after somebody go after the manufacturer of said baby monitor.
Look at the moment, the owner of devices that participate in DDoSes are not head liable, and neither are manufacturers who don't secure their shit.
This needs to change.
At the end of the day it is very difficult to impose security management across consumers. You cannot expect the average consumer to pen test their home network and have active vulnerability scanning software to mitigate potential vulnerabilities that result in Botnets.
It is difficult to hold people liable when someone else misappropriates their assets in a way that was not its original intended purpose. When its difficult to capture the perpetrator people start to blame everything else, that doesn't mean we should just shift liability to the buyer who is just simply an easier target to place the blame on than a random unidentified person in another country.
That may sound like a solution but its not the right one. Now someone has the ability to misappropriate your assets from the other side of the world and you become charged with the crime, when all you did was buy a new Samsung TV. Heck knowing that, maybe someone would target you knowing full well you'd be in trouble for it.