Chapter 3- Case #3 Whistle-Blowing Divides IT Security Community

Questions:

    1.       Do you think that Mike Lynn acted in a responsible manner? Why or why not?

        

        Lynn’s discovery was momentous and he decided that he had to speak out and let IT security professionals and the public know about the danger. Lynn’s said: “ I feel I had to do what’s right for the country and the national infrastructure”.

    2.       Do you think that Cisco and ISS were right to pull the plug on Lynn’s presentation at the Black Hat conference? Why or why not?

        They have no right to plugged out Lynn’s presentation. They must listen first to Lynn’s statement because all he wants is to do the right thing and it could help for them.

   3.       Outline a more reasonable approach toward communicating the flaw in the Cisco routers that would have led to the problem being promptly addressed without stirring up animosity among the parties involved.

        Lynn’s discovered a network worms- A small, self-replicating application— most often created by a vandal rather than a corporate spy—that infects a host computer and then copies itself to every other computer attached to the host. Most network worms can saturate a network in hours or days because they grow logarithmically—every infected computer represents not one but an array of other possible victims, so that 10 infections become 100, which become 1,000, which become 10,000, and so on.

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