Sunday, 14 May, 2000 Super-highway potholed by cyber-vandals

AS THE first few kilometres of the information super-highway were being laid down several years ago, computer hackers and virus disseminators tended to be regarded as the modern-day equivalent of graffiti artists, armed with modems instead of aerosol cans.

The somewhat benign image was strengthened by plentiful stories of high-school students hacking into top-secret government files for the fun of it.

But cyber-vandalism remained fairly remote from the concerns of most people, for as long as computers remained the province of big business.

Attitudes have changed, however, with the growth of e-commerce, the proliferation of home computers and the growth of the Internet. No longer are cyber-vandals just irritating computer nerds. They are criminals, capable of widespread commercial destruction and loss of business measured in the billions of dollars.

Society would not sit complacently by if a criminal blew up a section of highway. Well, the Internet is the 21st-century equivalent of the infrastructures of old. Millions of people rely on it for communication, millions more for commerce.

The "love bug" virus which swept the globe earlier this month was estimated to have infected 800 of the top 1000 United States companies within hours of its release. Unlike last year's Melissa virus, which was highly contagious but less destructive, the "love bug" destroyed files and may even have been aimed at stealing passwords, including ones enabling users to conduct online banking. The virus spread by accessing computer address books and sending itself to every address in the book. The opening of the e-mail message at the other end released the virus and the process of replication began again.

Within days, 1.5 million Australian computers had received the virus. An estimated 45 million e-mail users world-wide had been affected and the cost was estimated to be about $17 billion and rising.

With one in four Australian households linked to the Internet, the seriousness of cyber-vandalism cannot be underestimated.

Security systems are being improved all the time, as are anti-virus programs. But in many cases the criminal law has not kept pace with the technology.

Even though police in the Philippines have arrested suspects in the Love Bug case, for example, that country has no law against computer hacking.

By its nature the Internet is a global infrastructure, and Internet vandalism is a global crime. The imperative for all nations is to come up with workable ways of prosecuting cyber-vandals, wherever they strike

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news2/edit.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 13, 2000