Topic: Will Bitcoin help eliminating insecure PCs, Bot nets, DDoS attacks? (Read 361 times)

This is very good!

As with all things digital, there are a number of concerns to do with security, with the fear of hackers and e’spivs. Imagine a world that has shifted entirely to bitcoin. Would we not live in fear that some  hacker will get the better of Nakamoto’s algorithm and manipulate it to his benefit?

well in the past it was also more easy to steal card credential with a marlware that infect an insecure desktop

i think the punishment is the same, the mentality it's even worse, and the possible infected computer can only grow, because there are more people using it, there are more non-tech savy people dealing with pc each day

i don't think we will see a progression here, besides all this can be avoided with a simple backup, so it's means that there will be always a certain % of negligence

I think this releates to technique, philosopy and politics.

Thesis:

In the past (without Bitcoin), people who was running an insecure computer(PC), unfortunateley where not harmed by doing so. Their PC was infected by a trojan program (virus) and got then part of a bot net and participated e.g. in DDoS attacks and sending email spam without knowledge of their owners, executing the commands that the trojan software received from it's command & control (C&C) server, controlled by the bot net "owner". Maybe also data was stolen from the PC, without knowledge of the PC owner. At least, often users running an insecure PC could not connect this fact to getting harmed later by stolen data (e.g. passwords, credit card data) from PC etc.

Now, there is a new type of software that can be installed on insecure PCs: Ransomware. Data on the infected PC is encrypted and can only be decrypted if paying Bitcoin. So now, the owner of the PC directly get's punished for running an insecure PC. This will lead to much more IT security awareness and hopefully to a spread of operating systems with much better security design etc. and hopefully, will eliminate insecure computers completely, because even if owners of PCs learn to backup their data, they won't like to see their data encrypted by trojan software and need to restore backup.

In succession of the higher IT security awareness and more secure PCs, the absence of millions of insecure PCs like they exist now, could lead to the end of bot nets and therefore DDoS attacks and fewer computers sending email spam.