[AusNOG] The Ransomware to come

[Paul Wilkins]

In light of today's ransomware attack, (74 countries/with demands
translated in 28 languages), I'm tempted to take a step back and take a
longer optic on the gap between what the internet was meant to be, and what
exists today. The OSI model which built the net was built on implicit trust
between each layer and the one above. It was never anticipated that in a
couple of milliseconds, a few hundred packets from Kazakhstan could span
the globe to hard drives around the world, and a ubiquitous operating
system would then lock up people's data with hard cryptography.

You don't even need to play Cassandra to realise there's a genuine risk
sooner or later, someone will sign a driver (ala Stuxnet), and significant
portions of the global internet population will lose their data. Actual
costs could run to billions of dollars. Unfortunately it will likely take
an event of such magnitude before there's broad recognition that the trust
model of the internet built on ipv4 is fundamentally broken, and we need a
new network protocol that supports integrated security, and this would be a
more worthwhile exercise than replacing ipv4 with ipv6.

Kind regards

Paul Wilkins
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