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Forum| Posted: 01/27/2004 | 2000 - 2003: The Age of (In)Security Grappling with worms, viruses, and a devastating terrorist attack
| Original Source:
Author: Dan Tynan
A San Jose Mercury News TV ad in the spring of 2001 summed up the era neatly: “A month ago, you were a 28-year-old millionaire. Now you’re just 28.”
Whereas the Y2K deadline passed with barely a whimper, the Nasdaq collapse in April 2000 obliterated dot-com fortunes virtually overnight, signaling the end of a 10-year economic boom. But bigger disasters lay ahead, as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 would tragically demonstrate.
The Internet’s infrastructure also proved vulnerable. Massive DoS (denial of service) attacks in February 2000 took down the biggest sites, including Amazon, CNN, and Yahoo. Two years later, a DoS attack briefly disabled nine of the Net’s 13 DNSes. A series of increasingly virulent worms — Code Red, Nimbda, Klez, Blaster, Slammer, SoBig — infected millions of machines. Slammer also disabled ATMs, 911 call centers, and other systems that weren’t supposed to be connected to the Net.
Chastened by a series of security flaws, Bill Gates outlined his Trustworthy Computing initiative in January 2002. During the next 18 months Microsoft released 60 security bulletins with a severity rating of “critical” for patches that applied to various products. The company also came under attack from an unexpected (and open) source: Linux, now poised to become the second biggest player in the network server market.
Meanwhile, Internet2, the next-generation research network, begins to bear fruit. Initial apps include the first live opera transmitted over the Internet.
With Linux for desktops waiting in the wings and computing platforms exploding to include cell phones to set-tops, the next era of the digital age may be the most exciting yet. |
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