Your analogy is slightly off. A wave is an act of nature: this is more along the lines of a jealous kid who knocks down someone else's sandcastle because he can't build his own.
In terms of moral culpability, sure. But when I put systems on the internet, I basically treat "intrusion attempts" as in practice part of the environment, like "mosquito bites" are in Texas. Perhaps they're best thought of as kids knocking down sandcastles rather than ocean waves, but their ubiquity makes them feel more like ocean waves, because you can basically assume that there are tons of those kids, and they're going to kick at your sandcastle every day.
The fact that there's a whole ecosystem of bots running automated intrusion attempts makes them feel a little bit force-of-nature-ish as well. If you lived in some neighborhood where thousands of roving robots were constantly checking doors to see if they could find an unlocked one, you'd have to treat "roving robots" as a quasi force of nature. Well, either that, or come up with a policing method that finds the controller of the robots and shuts them down, but I have relatively low hopes for how much of a dent "cybercrime" policing will make in the overall online-intrusion ecosystem.
In terms of moral culpability, sure. But when I put systems on the internet, I basically treat "intrusion attempts" as in practice part of the environment, like "mosquito bites" are in Texas. Perhaps they're best thought of as kids knocking down sandcastles rather than ocean waves, but their ubiquity makes them feel more like ocean waves, because you can basically assume that there are tons of those kids, and they're going to kick at your sandcastle every day.
The fact that there's a whole ecosystem of bots running automated intrusion attempts makes them feel a little bit force-of-nature-ish as well. If you lived in some neighborhood where thousands of roving robots were constantly checking doors to see if they could find an unlocked one, you'd have to treat "roving robots" as a quasi force of nature. Well, either that, or come up with a policing method that finds the controller of the robots and shuts them down, but I have relatively low hopes for how much of a dent "cybercrime" policing will make in the overall online-intrusion ecosystem.