Attack Of The Love Bug

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Even if the authorities catch up with "spyder," and administrators succeed in mopping up the Love Bug and all its evil progeny, what kind of future is there for an Internet so fragile that a cobbled-together program can bring it to its knees? It is painfully obvious that the present network lacks any built-in immune system to defend it against malicious infections. Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of the legendary hacker journal 2600, stresses that better technology is the answer--not passing more laws or throwing more hackers in prison. "Melissa should have protected us from this," he said at a 2600 gathering Friday night. "Catching the guy doesn't prevent hackers. All the legislation in the world will not stop a 12-year-old in Thailand from doing this."

Clearly, the Internet is still not ready for prime time. "Without architectural improvements," warns Jeff Carpenter of the CERT Coordination Center, a federally funded computer-security group affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, "we will see this again." The next time could be worse. Imagine what a well-designed Love Bug could do when we have become even more dependent on computer networks and those networks are wireless. An Internet outage could keep us not only from sending e-mail but also from gassing up the car or depositing our paychecks. Warns Symantec vice president Steve Cullen: "We're only fractionally connected right now. The possibility for virus attacks will become exponentially greater in the wireless future."

The medium may be new, but human nature hasn't changed: whatever firewalls and antidotes the virus hunters come up with, virus writers will always find a way around them. As veteran hacker Goldstein puts it, "If your system can be knocked out, assume it will be."

What last week's attack teaches us is that if we want to become a connected society, it is not enough to defend our own backyard (i.e., our own PC). We have to clean up the streets and build an Internet in which it is safe for us to stay as intimately linked as we clearly want to be.