Cyber criminals no longer target your computer - they threaten society itself. This is the story of how a few self-selecting techno geeks fought the most devious and destructive attack ever launched on the web

 

  By Mark Bowden,  The Observer, 19 February 2012

 

      

 

 

A computer attack could compromise nuclear reactors, electrical grids,

transportation networks and pipelines. In America this would be considered

an act of war that would justify a military response. Illustration: Rob Biddulph for the Observer

 

Even though it has become a part of daily life, the internet itself remains a cloudy idea to most people. It's nebulous in a deeper way than previous leaps in home technology. Take the radio. Nobody knew how that worked, but you could picture invisible waves of electromagnetic particles arriving from the distance like the surf. Or TV... well, nobody understood that, except that it was like the damn radio only the waves were more complex and hence delivered pictures, too. There was something going on there you could picture, even if falsely. But the internet is just there.

It is all around us, like the old idea of luminiferous ether. No antenna. No waves - at least, none of the kind readily understood. And it contains not just a voice or picture, but... the whole world and everything in it: pictures, sounds, text, movies, maps, art, propaganda, music, news, games, mail, whole national libraries, books, magazines, newspapers, sex, along with close-up pictures of Mars and Jupiter, your long-forgotten great-aunt Margaret, the menu at your local Thai restaurant, everything you ever heard of and plenty you had not ever dreamed about, all of it just waiting to be plucked out of thin air.

 

Behind his array of three monitors at the headquarters of SRI International in Menlo Park in California [the research institute originally founded by Stanford University], Phil Porras occupies a desk in the birthplace of this marvel. Inside the very large computer he gets to play with, Porras creates a network of "virtual computers". He sees the internet not in some vague sense, but as something very real, comprehensible and alarmingly fragile.

 

 

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