The socialised cost of online abuse

This time on PING I'm talking to Alban Kwan from the Trusted Notifier Network (TNN). I caught up with Alban at the APRICOT/APNIC61 meeting held recently in Jakarta, where Alban was attending the policy and governance sessions with a particular interest in the problem of online abuse mitigation. Alban is interested in bridging the gap between the business and technical communities in this problem space. When it comes to crafting a response, business tends to focus on brand integrity and the real world cost of mitigation when their products and services are abused, used for spam or fraud or suffer inbound attacks against them. The technical community tends to be focused on things like network traffic level views of problems, found in deep packet inspection, running honey nets, looking at firewall logs and in turn, tends to drive security activities in network technology. It's a very real cultural divide. We've discussed the more technical, packet-level distributed threats on previous episodes of ping. We've talked with Adli Wahid from APNIC and with Leslie Daigle from Global Cyber Alliance, discussing honey nets which present as low barrier attack targets and can measure the levels of abuse coming to unprotected websites and online services and help pinpoint where they come from. In addition, Leslie has raised her concern that we need a conversation in wider civil society about the governance issues to address this problem because technology alone can't solve what's clearly a societal problem. TNN is part of that civil society response to online abuse, albeit in a slightly different form, focussed on communication between the involved parties and a concept of a higher trust channel, a better signal-to-noise ratio which reduces real world cost and preserves business reputation. Alban has an interesting analytical model of how to think about the problem and I think it's interesting to look at his engagement with business process and how people build mutuality and trust dealing with abuse problems of any kind.