Attack Of The Love Bug

• Share

(6 of 6)

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.

--Reported by Maryanne Murray Buechner/Helsinki, Massimo Calabresi, Elaine Shannon and Mark Thompson/ Washington, David Jackson/Los Angeles, Eric Roston, Wilson Rothman and Jyoti Thottam/New York, Nelly Sindayen/Manila, Ursula Sautter/Bonn and Wendy Kan/Hong Kong