I will never understand why there isn’t an international law enforcement agency with teeth, which can get rid of the bad actors.

Because every single nation would have to sign on to it allowing said agency to ignore sovereignty of each nation to come in and do their policing.

You'd also need to have every country not actively involved in these types of schemes yet we know some governments are directly benefiting from the scams/theft their citizens are perpetrating.

You'd also need to have every country think the things you want to police against are wrong. Again, we know that's just not true.

International DDoS busts and arrests do happen all the time.

Law enforcement takes time. The perpetrators of these attacks aren't hanging out in the open with their full names shielded only by the hope that their country won't extradite for political favor.

By the time the perpetrators are identified and a case is built, getting them charged isn't bottlenecked on the lack of an international agency. Any international law enforcement agency would be beholden to each country's own political wills and ideals, meaning any "teeth" they had would be no more effective than what we currenly have for extraditing people or cooperating with foreign police organizations.

The international organisation for stopping wars, human trafficking, money laundering, drug distribution etc. however capable they might be, haven't managed to stamp out any of those things.

I'd say a putative UN NetWatch would suffer from the same issues of funding and corruption and politics, but still we might have something better than this wild west lawlessness.

It's national interest of China and Russia to see the West to fail. Why would they co-operate? They are willing to murder people, West and their own, so "law" enforcement means a bit different in international context.

Since this is a distributed attack, I'm not really sure how that enforcement would look like? Am I missing something, are all these bots/zombies easily selectable and blockable?

> international law enforcement agency

You mean Team America, World Police?

Besides the fact that not much happens in the international public sector, law enforcement is more about deterrence than prevention. Criminals aren't deterred by law enforcement, so the bad actors never stop. Human nature's a bitch.

If they did focus on prevention instead, most of this could be... prevented. Create a treaty that mandates how critical infrastructure technology is created/sold. Consumer routers will stop being shit at security, and home devices are slowed-down in upstream spamming. That's a good chunk of the denial-of-service market gone, with no need to police the world.

...but the criminals are smart and intentionally avoid attacking the powerful, so nobody cares. Same reason organized crime still exists. It's poor people caught up in gang violence and crime, not rich people, so it persists.

Because countries benefit from conducting cyber warfare, the most publicised of are north Korea and Russia which have large state sponsored hacking groups.

If we were all running IPv6, we could just block this crap.

But here we are in 2025 still running IPv4 with CGNAT, so we can't.

Perhaps because, in many cases, the very governments responsible for enforcing it include the bad actors themselves.

the real reason why these are a problem in the first place is because of cgnat and transit providers not implementing flowspec.

but these bad actors are not possible to track down in the first place since internet is unfortunately decentralized and things as simple as transactions submitted to bitcoin or etherium blockchain can be used as c&c

Because it's not technicaly possible, I mean we're on HN, we all know how internet works.

How would you even enforce this if the offending country doesn't agree?

Who would they take orders from?

Who is going to elect and oversee them? I don't want to be governed by China or Russia.

many countries sponsor these attackers

do you really think for example America would allow say Chinese prosecutors to arrest Americans on American soil and take them abroad to sentence them in a court that America has no influence over and then throw them in a prison which America doesn’t control?

I'm sure you could come up with at least few ideas why it hasn't happened

What countries do you think these bad actors reside? Russia, China, Iran, and NK will wipe their ass with any law enforcement request.

Those exist but they might have a different idea of what makes an actor bad than you and I. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.

Legal systems are so convoluted and so colossally heterogenous - also very protective of their ways - around the globe that miniscule collaborations require grandiose efforts to initiate and maintain. No chance these fast paced adversaries will be caught by the interplay of several dozens of reluctant dinosaur legal systems.

Tangential: once I was targeted by a pretty primitive scam. More than 10 years ago (after someone I love was naive and inexperienced, having a medium amount stolen in a sensitive and stressful time of this person's life). I recognised fast and having time and will I sarted to play along, pretending I bite the bait. Collecting info while acting. In parallel trying to connect local and international authorities to report an ongoing scam effort. I believe I tried 4 organizations in 3 different countries apparently involved, I believe one was dedicated to online scams, also trying to warn Western Union, they are about to be used for scam. I even went personally to a police station locally to get some advice on how to assist catching the criminals. Since all I encountered insisted to report my damages, so they could start an investigation on an actual loss happened, I furiously gave up and decided whenever I will be having financial trouble I will invest my efforts in scamming others. No-one cares catching those in act! So the thugs can be incredibly bold and dumb, like the one I encountered, it is no effort doing better.

America gonna allow someone else to regulate them?

I mean, America can’t do anything about scam phone calls aimed at seniors who forge caller ID of local hospitals.