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Ban Naughty Countries From the Net: Former Intelligence Chief


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Countries in Eastern Europe and Africa that harbor cyber criminals should be locked out of the global Internet until their governments do something to reduce the threats, the former chief technology officer at the U.S. National Security Agency says.

Prescott Winter, who left the NSA in February after a 27-year career there, including as its CTO, says governments and Internet providers around the world could target countries regularly identified as havens for cyber criminals and as the source of many security threats affecting Internet users worldwide. Even global superpowers like China have been accused of sponsoring hackers to attack Western Internet companies including Google.

Winter says that when countries are consistently introducing cyber threats the global community should band together to effectively shut them out of the Internet until their governments do something about it. "In some cases the governments are clearly condoning this behavior, clearly benefiting from it in some ways, and there needs to be a message not just to the guys who are writing this code and shipping it around but to the government," Winter says.

From The Sydney Morning Herald
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