If that premise is recognised, that would imply a call for all the attendant sanctions and penalties (UN / US OFAC etc) that are attached to states like Iran, Cuba, Syria .. and of course, finding a state and/or international organization who gets to bell the cat and brand either or both world power + permanent member of the UN a rogue state. The geopolitical implications of that would be startling, for sure. The cyberwar angle is where it is far easier for two things to happen - 1. The line between non state and state actors is blurred 2. Even those non state actors who have engaged in "cyberwar" have had several layers of separation and plausible deniablity between them and the relevant states. Of course - mere online crime is far more traceable and can be pinned on specific persons. Especially where there's an offline dimension such as kidnap and forced prostitution like in this case. Authors of bots can be tracked, street hoods / mobsters etc are quite often well known to the police in their local area of operations. The trouble is, of course, actually getting cooperation from law enforcement in other countries (either because of a lack of MLATs / extradiation treaties etc, and/or because of well.. informal arrangements between some police officers and criminals)

Or we could just fix our banking infrastructure so they can't steal our money. Then figure out what parts of our critical infrastructure matter and fix them so that they can't be knocked out by a cyber attack. If we applied half the effort that that has gone into DRM schemes into building secure control systems we would be secure. The reason DRM schemes are breakable is that they are attempting to keep secret information that can potentially be read by a billion plus end points.

I agree with your point about securing banking infrastructure. Just wondering if a broader perspective isn't needed .. its a single tree in a huge forest (though a rather large tree, I must admit)

There really is much less difference between terrorism and organized crime than US commentators imagine. The Baader Meinhof gang financed itself robbing banks, the IRA ran protection rackets, Al Qaeda provides logistics and support for the opium trade. Organized crime is actually pretty difficult to set up, there is no honor amongst thieves, they constantly inform and engage in power struggles amongst themselves. It usually takes a major binding force to keep the groups together over a long period. The Triads and the Mafia both began as political movements, members of the IRA have turned to major bank robberies. State support for terrorism was not a factor in the rise of any of the major European groups and probably did little to sustain them at their peak. The East Germans almost certainly allowed the Baader-Meinhof gang to continue operating for several most years, but they never directed it in the way US observers tend to imply. Hezbollah was formed in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it received support from Iran because it had already established itself as the major Shi'ite power in the Lebanese resistance and civil war. It is not an arm of the Iranian regime. Terrorist actions by states are a different matter. The French blew up the Rainbow Warrior, the Libyans were probably responsible for Lockerbie. But most governments announce their terrorist acts in advance as 'military actions' of some sort. Planting bombs on a plane is considered terrorism. But dropping them on civilian areas from a military plane is not. The real concern for me as far as cyber is concerned is that the barriers to entry are low and there is no possibility of reliable attribution. Yet military and diplomatic strategy is dominated by people who have built their careers on nuclear deterrence. Another real problem with the cyber-crime nexus is that it can threaten the regime itself. All a certain Russian colonel needed to build a personal private army was the ability to guarantee them immunity from prosecution in return for certain political 'favors' from time to time. The problem with such people is that they can become a bit too powerful. Hitler faced a similar problem with his Stormtroopers. That is why the NAZIs murdered about a hundred of their own people in the Rohm Purge (night of the long knives) four years before Kristallnacht and the rest.

There is usually a clear distinction in the objectives of these - to classify them as "regular crime" and "crime for political goals" Yes, various terrorist operations have robbed banks and dealt drugs to finance their operations. And stories about nigerian scam revenues being funneled to anybody from niger delta terrorists to al qaeda. But that's a case of the same actors engaging in two different sets of crime. You can have dedicated terrorists who are not criminals and even think of themselves as a sort of robin hood. You can also have bank robbers and drug dealers whose intention isnt to overthrow the petit bourgeoisie as much as it is to get themselves drink money (or on a grand scale, sports cars, luxury villas, cash stashed in untraceable bank accounts)

What might be "black ops" to one country could well be a breach of the laws of another country. Like the recent cases in italy where various CIA members were prosecuted for extraordinary rendition of suspected al qaeda members, to the case in Dubai where suspected israeli agents using fake passports killed a Hamas leader. [Note - Israel certainly hasn't admitted to killing the guy]. It is not always that a country wants to advertise (let alone have it found out) that it has participated in a black ops operation in a foreign country.

Much as you post your thoughts on your blog, neil and jd post on circleid etc .. we need the equivalent of an RSS aggregator (or in cybercrime terms, Something on the lines of the AISI in Australia) set up across countries - a data aggregator and a network of points of contact to funnel reports to, as well as automated formats and tools to script and automate report processing. Something that's on a larger scale than ARF and not spam specific .. INCH/IODEF if it gets sufficient traction perhaps.