Stop thinking in stereotypes!

Stereotypes may help you form a quick opinion about matters, however you almost certainly would be wrong. Romania has a few such associated stereotypes (like orphans), but the one related to IT security is East-European criminals.

In-line with this perception we have the latest F-Secure blog post Romanian Whack-A-Mole and Linux Bots (disclaimer: I work for a security company, but these views are my own).

People please wake up and smell the roses: security is a global problem! The fact that a given IP is located in a give country gives you almost no information about the real perpetrators behind the scene! I could quote studies saying USA is the biggest source of spam, China has the most bots, but these are meaningless. The Internet is truly a cross-nation phenomenon (I invite you to check out the C&C map and bot map from shadowserver - as you can see they follow approximately the distribution of computers rather than arbitrarily country/region borders). Shutting it down in one place will just move it to an other country, unless we can act united.

PS. I have no connection to Shadowserver (just a fan of their effort). Check out this presentation for AusCert08 given by one of the members. Good stuff.