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    Home Cybersecurity
    • Cybersecurity

    The Big One

    Written by

    John Dvorak
    Published January 30, 2004
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      Californians like to talk about the Big One: the disaster-of-the-century earthquake that will wreck the state. Its coming soon, they say. Well, so is the big attack that will shut down the Internet completely and destroy all computers—the online equivalent of the Big One. So far, all weve had are slight tremors.

      The viruses and denial-of-service attacks weve seen so far are nuisances. They clog up e-mail systems or send inane messages. The most efficient attacks spread rapidly and then are eradicated by patches and updates to antivirus programs. But we havent yet seen an attack that delivers a serious payload both to the machines propagating the problem and to the Internet infrastructure.

      To accomplish this would require using all available means to penetrate every machine and spread virally while destroying data and erasing hard drives everywhere at once. A disaster like this might finally make the community take some action. We already know that users will always do dumb things to trigger problems. But the computing environment itself encourages this, in many ways. Here are my concerns.

      24/7 computing. I have failed to grasp the push by Microsoft and others for being online 24/7. Cable modem lash-ups are the most dangerous high-speed weapon in a DNS attack and are installed as always-on connections in the homes of the most naive users.

      John Dvorak
      John Dvorak
      John C. Dvorak is an editor of PC Magazine, for which he has been writing two columns, including the popular Inside Track, since 1986. Dvorak has won eight national awards from the Computer Press Association, including Best Columnist and Best Column. Dvorak's work appears in several magazines and newspapers, including Boardwatch, Computer Shopper, and MicroTimes. He is the author of several books on computing including the popular Dvorak's Guide to Telecommunications. His radio show, 'Real Computing,' can be heard on National Public Radio.

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