Despite major Security outlays and legislative proposals to reduce cybercrime we the lawful computer
users are losing the war against cybercrime.
Why Well for starters the statistics are against us.
If you consider that there are 2 billion computer systems that have an internet connection and rather
optimistically assume that 99 percent of them are secured against basic threats and types of attacks.
It still means that 20 million attacks per month will be successful.
This translates into 240 million computers to get infected with malicious software each year.
And remember we're being very optimistic here.
The numbers by and large are simply against us in this fight.
Why don't we take a look at the past to get a better picture of all this.
Let's start with prehistory.
The Stone Age of computer systems is the 90s during this era.
We had Robert Morris who became famous largely as the creator of the first widely spreading computer
worm the worm exploited software bugs in Unix services in sendmail and among others in RSA.
And our Exec the worm also attempted to crack passwords anyway.
Morse himself claimed that he created the worm and released it on the net.
The Internet of those days to measure its size.
Each infected machine responded to the attackers So Morris was able to determine the number of infected
computers to prevent the same machine from being infected multiple times.
The worm used the mechanism that asked whether the computer already had a copy of the worm if it responded
yes the computer would not be re-infected which means that a progeny process of the worm would not be
launched this mechanism could have been easily subverted to stop the epidemic.
It would have been enough to run without analyzing the functioning of the virus.
A program that responded with yes.
When asked whether the computer was infected or wouldn't it realizing that this could stop his attack.
Robert Morris decided that one in seven infected computers would be re-infected regardless of their
answer.
Morse apparently did not imagine what would be the scale of mass spreading viruses.
About 10 percent of Unix systems attached to the Internet roughly several thousand computers were infected
with the worm and so the first attempt to gauge the size of the Internet in the 90s ended up as the
first global denial of service attack.
Robert Morris or someone who claimed to be Morriss then sent out an e-mail which poked fun at a common
media belief.
Or should I use the word paranoia which pictured cyber criminals.
And I don't call them hackers for reasons I'll explain later as people who as you can see could turn
your computer into a bomb and detonate it remotely killing you and your family.
Robert Morris dutifully alerted his readers of a new type of virus which was worse than anything yet
found on the Internet.
A virus that distributed itself through power lines of 60 hertz by changing serial port pin outs and
reversing the direction in which disks spin
those among you who are a bit older may remember that computers used serial ports in the past.
There are also silly hints on fighting the virus first.
Don't attach your computer to a powerline
don't use batteries either.
Batteries are rumored to be infected as well.
Don't copy any files don't read any messages including the one you're reading now.
Don't use serial ports don't use modems
modems or another relic of the past.
They were used to connect your device to the Internet don't use keyboards screens or printers
don't use electricity and heating.
You might say that an exaggerated media reaction triggered an exaggerated response from well let's call
it the computer systems security experts movement.
Time has shown however that this exaggerated reaction was unfortunately not so absurd after all.