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FireStarter: Consumer Internet Penalty Box

Mike Rothman October 12, 2010 10 Comments

A few weeks back, the fine folks at Microsoft used a healthcare analogy to describe a possible solution to the Internet’s bot infestation. Scott Charney suggested that every PC should have a health certificate which would provide access to the Internet. No health certificate, no access. Kind of like a penalty box for consumer Internet users. It’s an interesting idea, and clearly we need some kind of solution to the reality that Aunt Bessie has no idea her machine has been pwned and is blasting spam and launching DDoS attacks. Unfortunately it won’t work, unless mandated by some kind of regulation. It’s really an economic thing. Comcast will proactively send devices connected to their network exhibiting bad behavior a message telling them they are likely compromised. They call it their Bot Alert program. Then they point to a nice web page where the consumer can get answers. The consumer is then expected to address the issue. If they can’t (or don’t) Comcast will continue to notify the customer until they do. Here’s the rub: if the consumer knew what they were doing in the first place, they wouldn’t have gotten pwned. You can’t blame Comcast (or any other ISP) for drawing a line in the sand. They charge maybe $40 a month for Internet service. The minute a customer picks up the phone and calls for help, they lose money for that month. There is no financial incentive for them to try to fix the compromised device. Sure, a bot does bad things. But bad enough to spend staff time trying to fix every one of them? The constant notifications will definitely push a customer to call and force Comcast to help them address the issue. I guess that worked OK in their pilot test, but we’ll see how well it scales as they roll it out nationwide. And Comcast seems to be out in front on this issue. I’m not familiar with any similar initiatives from the other major ISPs. So let’s tip our hat to Comcast for at least trying to do something. But is it the right approach? Do we just accept the fact that a percentage of consumer devices will be pwned and will exhibit bad behavior. Is it a cost of doing business for the ISPs? Is there some other kind of technical, procedural, or cultural answer? I wish I knew. What do you folks think? Can this health certificate thing work? Am I just stuck in a cycle of cynicism that prevents me from seeing any solution to this problem? Or do we just make sure our families aren’t the path of least resistance and forget the rest? Share:

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IT Debt: Real or FUD?

Adrian Lane October 12, 2010 3 Comments

I just ran across Slashdot’s mention of the Measuring and Monitoring Technical Debt study funded by a research grant. Their basic conclusion is that a failure to modernize software is a form of debt obligation, and companies ultimately must pay off that debt moving forward. And until the modernization process happens, software degrades towards obsolescence or failure. From Andy Kyte at Gartner: “The issue is not just that maintenance keeps on getting deferred, it is that the lack of an application inventory and the absence of a structured review process for the application portfolio. This means the IT management team is simply never aware of the true scale of the problem,” Mr. Kyte said. “This problem, hidden from sight, is getting bigger every year and more difficult to deal with every year.” I am on the fence on the research position – apparently others are as well – and I disagree with many of the assertions because the cost of inaction needs to be weighed against the cost of overhauls. The cost of migration is significant. Retraining users. Retraining IT. New software and maintenance contracts. The necessary testing environments and regression tests. The custom code that needs to be developed in order to work with the software packages. Third party consulting agreements. New workflow and management system integration. Fixing bugs introduced with the new code. And so on. In 2008, 60% of the clients of my former firm were running on Oracle & IBM versions that were 10 years old – or older. They stayed on those version because the databases and applications worked. The business functions operated exactly as they needed them to – after 2-5 years of tweaking them to get them exactly right. A new migration was considered to be another 2-5 year process. So many firms selected bolt-on, perimeter-based security products because there was no way to build security into a platform in pure maintenance mode. And they were fine with that, as the business application was designed to a specification that did not account for changes to the security landscape, and depended on network and platform isolation. But the primary system function it was designed for worked, so overhaul was a non-starter. Yes, the cost of new features and bug fixes on very old software, if needed, was steep. But that’s just it … there were very few features and bug fixes needed. The specifications for business processing were static. Configuration and maintenance costs we at a bare minimum. The biggest reason why “The bulk of the budget cut has fallen disproportionately on maintenance activities –” was because they were not paying for new software and maintenance contracts! Added complexity would have come with new software, rather than keeping the status quo. The biggest motivator to upgrade was that older hardware/OS platforms was either too slow, or began failing. A dozen or so financial firms I spoke with performed this cost analysis and felt that every day they did not upgrade saved them money. It was only in segments that required rapid changes to meet changing market – retail and shipping come to mind – that corporations benefitted from modernization and new functionality to improve customer experience. I’ll be interested to see if this study sways IT organizations to modernize. The “deferred maintenance” message may resonate with some firms, but calling older software a liability is pure FUD. What I hope the study does is prompt firms to compare their current maintenance costs against upgrades and new maintenance – the only meaningful must be performed within a customer environment. That way they can intelligently plan upgrades when appropriate, and be aware of the costs in advance. You can bet every sales organization in the country will be delivering a copy of this research paper to their customers in order to poke and prod them into spending more money. Share:

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