Criminals 'may overwhelm the web'

[davieG]

Criminals controlling millions of personal computers are threatening the internet's future, experts have warned. Up to a quarter of computers on the net may be used by cyber criminals in so-called botnets, said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet.

Technology writer John Markoff said: "It's as bad as you can imagine, it puts the whole internet at risk."

The panel of leading experts was discussing the future of the internet at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Internet pandemic

Mr Cerf, who is one of the co-developers of the TCP/IP standard that underlies all internet traffic and now works for Google, likened the spread of botnets to a "pandemic".

Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.

Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.

While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.

Net resilience

Mr Markoff, who writes for the New York Times, said that a single botnet at one point used up about 15% of Yahoo's search capacity.

It used retrieved random text snippets to camouflage messages so that its spam e-mail could get past spam filters.

"Despite all that, the net is still working, which is amazing. It's pretty resilient," said Mr Cerf.

The expert panel, among them Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers, and Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, agreed that a solution had to be found to ensure the survival of the web.

But its members were unsure about feasible solutions, even though they identified operating systems and authentication as key issues.

It was still too easy for net criminals to hide their tracks, several panel members said, although they acknowledged that it was probably not desirable that every individual was definitively identifiable.

"Anonymity has its value, and it has its risk," said Jonathan Zittrain, professor for internet governance at the University of Oxford.

Closing doors

Operating systems like Microsoft Windows, meanwhile, still made it too easy for criminals to infiltrate them, the experts said.

Microsoft had done a good job improving security for its latest operating system, Windows Vista, said Mr Markoff.

But already pirated copies of Vista were circulating in China, even though the consumer launch of Vista has been scheduled for next Tuesday.

Experience showed that about 50% of all pirated Windows programmes came with Trojans pre-installed on them, Mr Markoff said.

Mr Dell said the future might bring "disposable virtual PCs", accessed through the internet, that would minimise the threat of a persistent virus infection.

Mr Toure said that whatever the solution, the fight against botnets was a "war" that could only be won if all parties - regulators, governments, telecoms firms, computer users and hardware and software makers - worked together.

[Steven]

If we all stopped using 'dows this problem would disappear.

[MC Prussian]

If we all stopped using 'dows this problem would disappear.

Or we could go back to Mother Nature. Outside. Fresh Air. Sunlight. Earth.

[Geo V]

Whether we like it or not, the fraudsters are one step ahead of us.

All we can do is not be stupid and dont have things like having the same password for everything, keep bluetooth on and tell too many people our business (ie these dumb surveys that we are asked to fill in). Also, try and get bloody insurance as its a god send (example, a mate of mines credit card details were swiped electrically, probably from a purchase he had made previously, someone used them to open up an account with a poker site and then withdrew £3k in one day and lost it on the poker tables! We subsequently found out that the money was "lost" on purpose to a person who had a legitimate account and that person "won" about £40k that day and half of the money was from stolen cards!! He got his money back but it took 3 months)

[Lord Nibblington]

Or we could go back to Mother Nature. Outside. Fresh Air. Sunlight. Earth.

Stop talking crazy. Everyone knows that those things aren't real!

[Geo V]

BTW to answer the question on the title of this thread, No I am not one although give me your card details and let me see if I can join in on the fun