Computers seem to be making our life ever more "interesting" (G-d help us!)

Will the total amount of computer power continue exceed the amount of computer power that must be lost to protecting the computer against viruses, spyware, and other computer security threats? I.e.: Will computers continue to be able to do useful work [however defined]?




		Fearing Havoc, Gumshoes Hunt Down a Virus

s a computer virus named SoBig.F swamped e-mail inboxes, wreaking havoc on individual PC's and corporate computer systems, computer security experts around the world spent a tense day trying to stop a more potentially serious electronic time bomb from going off: SoBig carries an attachment that, if opened, instructs the infected computer to communicate with one of 20 host PC's that, most likely unknown to their owners, were planted with a mystery program.

But the experts did not know what would then happen to the infected machines, or what instructions they would be given. And so the race was on to find the 20 computers and isolate them from the rest of the Internet before they could potentially send out more malicious instructions to millions of computers. The time of the first attack was to be 3 p.m. Eastern time... on Thursday [21 August 2003]....

By 3 p.m. on Thursday, after working around the clock... a team of security sleuths with F-Secure, a computer security company in Helsinki, Finland, that sells antivirus software... had decrypted the computer code. What they found was a list of 20 Internet Protocol, or I.P., addresses, linked to home computers in the United States, Canada and South Korea.

Further, they discovered a new twist. At 3 p.m. yesterday, tens of thousands of computers already infected with SoBig were supposed to connect to those 20 computers, using them as mere go-betweens, to retrieve a list of Web addresses. Once they were obtained, the machines infected with SoBig were supposed to download a program from those addresses.

What was supposed to happen after that no one knew, because "we stopped it," said Tony Magallanez, a systems engineer at F-Secure in San Jose.

To mitigate the threat, F-Secure engineers notified both the F.B.I. and the Internet service providers connected to the 20 computers. The addresses were then removed from the network by the Internet companies. In addition, the large telecommunications companies that provide the backbone for the Internet could have interceded and blocked all communication to those specific Internet addresses....

[C]omputer experts, in collaboration with Internet service providers and law enforcement agencies around the world, declared a partial victory: they were able to decrypt the virus's software, find the 20 computers and take at least 17 offline. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also served a subpoena to an Internet service provider in Phoenix that the authorities say could be the source of the virus.

And though the experts feared the host computers might give out catastrophic instructions, like telling the infected machines to erase their hard drives or begin new attacks, Symantec Security Response, a team within the Symantec Corporation, the Internet security company, said the remaining three host machines had simply redirected computers to a pornographic Web site. It is not known whether the other 17 would have performed similarly.

"The people who are in charge have sidestepped another attack or the potential for bad things to happen," said Jimmy Kuo, a research fellow at Network Associates, another Internet security company....

--Katie Hafner and Kirk Semple, "Fearing PC Havoc, Gumshoes Hunt Down a Virus", NYT, 23Aug03, p.A1.

(BMcC) don't read "mysteries" or "thrillers" (etc.), but I found this [real-life] story intensely "gripping". What ever-worse computer disasters await us in our "wired" future? How can we restructure, not just our technology, but our social world in which the technology is situated, to get as much of the benefits of technology as possible, without risking catastrophes at least as bad as persons encountered before they had the technology?

Learn about a serious danger in using The Internet.
Think about dangers of virtual reality.

Learn

how computer users, frustrated by complexity, do things to try to simplify their problems that make things easier for potential malefactors.

Read more computer thoughts and recollections.

08 May 2006CE (2006-05-08 ISO 8601)
v02.04

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