Sunday, October 12, 2003

The future of the internet

The future of the internet: some say it will end in chaos somewhere in the not so far future. I don’t think so. It will be a dwelling place for those capable enough to handle it. When development of viruses and worms like Blaster and SoBig continues, some will be effectively disconnected from the internet as theire website and connection points will be under constant compromise. This seems like a unfair situation of unequal . However, everyone has the right to join the internet. Only thing: in the future this right can only be claimed when you’re securing yourself enough. During the MSBlaster worm outbreak, the most informed person at my family’s house placed a paper on their PC, announcing to the rest of the house "do not go to the internet: danger of viruses!". I hope they really followed the advice, for at that time they were as vulnerable as a newborn baby. Statistically speaking, their PC would have be infected with, for the sake of the argument, 95% possibility within the hour after connection to the internet. I even think that’s’ too low, given the amount of connection to port 135 I received back then (and still: I just received 4 port 135 connections and 7 ICMP pings over just the last 15 minutes according to ZoneAlarm). As these ICMP pings are perfromed to check on the vailability of the victim PC, these will add up to 11 hack attempts. Every one of them would have resulted in infection I guess, to a vulnerable PC.
What's your opinion?