Spring Break
Hackers far scarier than terrorists
Bryan Murphy
Issue date: 2/26/09 Section: Commentary
Internet porn, teenage "sexting," music piracy, Nigerian scammers and MySpace bullies: the undisputed scourges of the Internet. Right?
But like 1940s media and popular press worrying that nuclear bombs would set the oxygen in the air on fire, or initiate " a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom," the boogeymen that haunt our modernized closets are, quite possibly, among the least of our problems.
Why? The Bomb's greatest danger wasn't brilliantly flaming atmospheres but invisible gamma radiation. And computers aren't going to destroy the planet because they help teenagers hook up - but CPUs may well push society off its axis if they continue to evolve beyond our general comprehension.
Computers haven't quite reached the "What do you think you're doing, Dave?" stage, of course. But that doesn't mean evolution isn't the proper framework to consider their advancement. After all, producing, programming and hacking computers takes some serious business chops, and we're all familiar with the whole market competition thing.
So consider the Conficker virus, which entered the world in October 2008. Microsoft released a patch to protect against Conficker completely on Oct. 15. By December, 500,000 were infected by the virus. By late February, around 15 million were infected - by a virus patched in October.
The Conficker virus has mutated dozens of times since its inception, grounding French jet fighters, infecting British and German military systems, shutting down the computer network of the Houston court system, and being found lingering on hospital computers in New Zealand, England and the U.S. Conficker hasn't done much - yet - but with its ability to auto-update itself, there's literally anything that it might do. And the world's coordinated "health response" to this serious digital pandemic?
Microsoft offered a $250,000 bounty on the head of the virus creator.
But like 1940s media and popular press worrying that nuclear bombs would set the oxygen in the air on fire, or initiate " a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom," the boogeymen that haunt our modernized closets are, quite possibly, among the least of our problems.
Why? The Bomb's greatest danger wasn't brilliantly flaming atmospheres but invisible gamma radiation. And computers aren't going to destroy the planet because they help teenagers hook up - but CPUs may well push society off its axis if they continue to evolve beyond our general comprehension.
Computers haven't quite reached the "What do you think you're doing, Dave?" stage, of course. But that doesn't mean evolution isn't the proper framework to consider their advancement. After all, producing, programming and hacking computers takes some serious business chops, and we're all familiar with the whole market competition thing.
So consider the Conficker virus, which entered the world in October 2008. Microsoft released a patch to protect against Conficker completely on Oct. 15. By December, 500,000 were infected by the virus. By late February, around 15 million were infected - by a virus patched in October.
The Conficker virus has mutated dozens of times since its inception, grounding French jet fighters, infecting British and German military systems, shutting down the computer network of the Houston court system, and being found lingering on hospital computers in New Zealand, England and the U.S. Conficker hasn't done much - yet - but with its ability to auto-update itself, there's literally anything that it might do. And the world's coordinated "health response" to this serious digital pandemic?
Microsoft offered a $250,000 bounty on the head of the virus creator.
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Old Computer Alum
posted 2/26/09 @ 12:10 PM EST
Here's an idea then- buy Linux. #1: Costs less than Windows by a country mile. #2. Easier to implement and has the same functionality of Windows. #3. (Continued…)
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