Taming the Hacking Storm

Chapter 5The Solution

“The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made.”

– Cormac McCarthy

Cybercrime has definitely changed (e.g., fake SMS messages, AI-enabled deepfake videos, etc.) since I started following it in 1987, although the main underlying reason it’s been so pervasive in our online world hasn’t changed at all since then. In Chapter 3, I revealed the main underlying reason why Internet cybercrime is so rampant: It is hard to identify, stop, and arrest online crooks. They can operate and commit their crimes over and over with near impunity. It’s been this way for decades since the beginning of the Internet.

Chapter 5 reveals my solution to that underlying problem. It will be a general theory discussion of the solution followed by the first of two threat modeling exercises. The first one, in this chapter, will threat model the theory of both the problem with a supposed perfect solution. A second, more detailed threat model examining the various involved technologies is in Chapter 13.

But for now, here’s my solution to the problem of rampant Internet crime.

Proposed Solution Theory

Internet crime is abundant because online criminals are almost never stopped, arrested, or punished. It is very low risk with huge upside profit potential.

Using upstream thinking and asking why this is true, I get the answer that it ultimately has to do with a lack of verifiable, trusted identity. We cannot stop ...