Early on in the investigation, they were apparently laughing about the incident and enjoying their stint in the media spotlight (Poulsen, 2008). Now that they have been sentenced to serious jail time and are forced to pay major restitution, the seriousness of their crime has undoubtedly begun to sink in. While there was no new legislation specifically attached to the Comcast incident, crimes such as this demonstrate that computer security is an enormously difficult problem for which no simple solution exists. Obviously there are differences between detecting an intrusion attack and preventing one from occurring in the first place. Preventative measures are obviously more helpful and less complicated, however with new intrusion techniques cropping up all the time, it is virtually impossible to predict exactly what needs to be secured and it what fashion.

Some people claim that the government needs to step and in do more to combat computer viruses, because not only can they halt the operations of businesses like Comcast, which slows the economy, but they could potentially wreak havoc on the government itself. The 2007 movie "Live Free or Die Hard" illustrated just how vulnerable our entire society is an environment run almost exclusively by electronics. Anyone with a great deal of computer savvy and the wrong intentions could potentially bring our world to halt. The Comcast incident is merely one of the many symptoms of the potential for mass destruction that professional hackers are capable of invoking.

While the scenario portrayed in Die Hard 4 was somewhat extreme, computer security breaches happen every day, ranging from annoying spam email directed at an individual, to intrusion attacks designed to infiltrate computer networks to gain access to sensitive and confidential data. The number of attacks against corporations, as well as the government, continues to increase despite the...

However it is becoming increasingly clear that money can't buy security any more than it can buy happiness, if the impenetrable device does not yet exist.
It seems with every new innovation in security comes a new innovation in security breaching, and the race on both sides of the fence seems infinite. Security measures and forensic techniques are becoming more advanced, but have yet to surpass the rate at which intrusion technology is growing. When three young men just fooling around can cost a company $90,000 in five hours, it seems clear that the hackers are staying far ahead of the corporations when it comes technological know-how.

On the whole, at the present time, readily available network security components such as Firewalls, Anti-Virus programs and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS's) are unable to effectively combat the vast range of malicious intrusion attacks perpetrated on computer networks and systems. This is where the need for proactive security measures comes into play and becomes a necessary part of making and keeping information technology secure.

References

Comcast Hackers sentenced to prison (2010, September 24) U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved from http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/lewisSent.pdf

Poulsen, K. (2008, May 29) Comcast hijacker say they warned the company first, Wired, Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/05/comcast-hijacke/

Poulsen, K. (2009, November 20) Three charged as Comcast hackers, CNN Tech/Wired. Retrieved from http://articles.cnn.com/2009-11-20/tech/comcast.hacking.charge_1_hackers-domain-e-mail?_s=PM:TECH