The sinister side of cyber-space

Five years ago things were different. Internet use was growing rapidly, fast access was on the way, computers were expected to continue improving and prices were expected to continue tumbling. The wonders of IT were getting bigger and cheaper and everyone wanted in.

Then the dotcom crash of 2000 warned that great ideas can prove as damaging as bad ones. Despite massive advances to simplify and improve computing in recent years problems do still arise.

Because individuals, companies, economies and arguably the whole world now relies on technology, the new fear is that a technological disaster would be monumentally damaging.

It seems that, despite what the mobile phone company would have you believe, the future could just as easily be black as it could be Orange.

Think about it: just how exciting will email be when, in three years, over 50 per cent of it is spam, as some predict?

How enjoyable will the internet be when all the best bits have been removed or password-protected for fear of piracy? How dependent have we become on an information superhighway that just one skilled hacker can direct towards total failure?

Sceptics have been prophesying IT doom for years. Only two years ago they were worrying that a shortage of website addresses would stifle growth. To solve this problem, the bodies that organise the internet agreed on new systems to ensure enough addresses for the next 50 years or so.

A similar concern was voiced over the millennium bug, which was expected to cause meltdown but was solved without the boffins breaking a sweat. While these were problems that were foreseen and solved, things are different now. The major dangers and pitfalls of technology are clearly defined and ready to be attacked.

Content to pay
First and foremost, the writing has been on the wall for original content for some time. Content, such as text and images, is what entices us into a website in the first place but with online advertising revenues still falling - and recent figures from AOL/Roper Starch claim that only 0.5 per cent of us bother to click on website ads - the days of providing it for free are surely numbered.

Already heavyweight news providers such as the Wall Street Journal are charging for content, and in five years many suspect that the internet will stop resembling free-to-air TV channels and become like satellite or pay-per-view TV.

Another underlying reason for this is piracy, now striking hard at every area of music, editorial and movie content. Recent record industry figures directly blame file-sharing applications such as Napster for reducing global CD sales by 10 per cent, at a cost of nearly $3bn.

In a world where the US's top-selling album, Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park, sells only five million copies but gets digitally ripped over four million times, who can blame Eminem for rush-releasing his new album or Celine Dion for ensuring that hers cannot be played on a PC? The music industry is now officially at war with the internet.

Hilary Rosen, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said: "A large factor contributing to the decrease in overall shipments last year is online piracy and CD burning.

"When 23 per cent of surveyed music consumers say they are not buying more music because they are downloading or copying their music for free, we cannot ignore the impact on the marketplace."

On the other hand, CD sales were up by a healthy five per cent in the UK last year and the sheer volume of music downloads taking place - up to 20 million per day - indicates a very real opportunity for online music distribution, provided someone finds a viable means of paying for it as credit cards are too expensive to use for small amounts.

Indeed, you could argue that the music industry's biggest mistake with MP3 was not getting onboard soon enough.

Digi-culture
A far bigger problem facing digital culture is one that challenges our very perception of it. For example, instant messaging and chat rooms are still fun for the majority of users, but how long will we continue to frequent them if message bots and cyber-stalkers increase at the current rate?

Already the experience is noticeably different for men and women. If not policed or filtered more effectively, whole swathes of the internet will become unusable for many women and others, not least teenagers whose vulnerability has already been exposed by recent chat room scandals.

Even now, I would say never put your picture on the internet," warned Clive Hudson, chief executive of ISE, an anti-stalking consultancy. "It's like waving a banner saying 'here I am, boys, come and get me'. Even if you try to remove it later it will be too late, regardless of what the law says."

Of course, the internet is not the only scapegoat here. Our growing reliance on computers means that most organisations are now little more than the sum of their databases.

If one glitch can bring down air traffic control for five hours, as happened recently when a single workstation failed at the new hi-tech Swanwick centre, and one terrorist attack can close Wall Street for seven days, who knows what can be achieved by a concerted or repeated strike on key industrial and commercial targets?

It is a scenario that government agencies around the world are now actively planning against, as political activists and terrorists become hackers too, increasingly realising how much damage they could cause with relatively little technology.

Future shock
Beyond computers, there are other serious technology problems lying in wait. As Mintel is about to release new figures showing that 70 per cent of us now have a mobile phone, antivirus experts are warning of a wave of mobile phone viruses waiting for the next-generation of internet connected phones to take off.

Text messaging spam is only just beginning to make its annoying presence felt and unwanted messages could yet become an even bigger problem than spam.

If you think today's addicts couldn't live without a mobile, consider how they would feel if they got 100 junk text messages per hour, then think again.

Revenge of the killer app
The internet's first killer application - the one use that made it such a pervasive success - is email. However, email is so popular that it's reaching critical mass. According to research by MessageLabs, spam already costs UK businesses £50,000 a year, with the average worker spending 10 minutes a day deleting it.

With the number of email addresses expected to top one billion by 2005, an increase of 138 per cent over current levels, the European Union already puts the cost of dealing with spam at around €6bn per year, making it a hidden but serious blow to commerce.

Elsewhere, companies are blocking whole continents from sending email to them. China Telecom alone receives up to 50,000 complaints per day over the tidal wave of spam passing through its computers. The question is: how can any medium continue to fulfil a useful function if so much of what passes through it is either unwanted or unpleasant?

Mark Shaw, a representative of security specialist DNS, believes that the anxiety behind the question is misplaced.

"Even with spam, there are solutions," he explained. "All the major internet companies are now providing better spam filters but there is a good chance we will see it decreasing of its own accord.

"If there's a company out there that thinks spam is a good marketing ploy, they've got some hard lessons coming. Indiscriminate email has no value and pretty soon everyone will see that."

Last line of defence
However, in the light of all these dangers, government responses are mixed at best. There is still resistance to EU proposals for 'opting in' to unsolicited email, claiming that it would hurt legitimate ecommerce.

This is despite research by anti-spam specialist Spamhaus suggesting that about 100 spammers may be responsible for 90 per cent of the problem in the US.

Furthermore, over-complex legislation on copyright, abuse and privacy, and abysmally low levels of prosecution, still make life a lot easier for villains than legitimate cyber citizens. All in all there are few signs that the dangers are being properly recognised.

"We're nearly at the worst case scenario now where people's lives could be fundamentally altered by computers," said Hudson. "Most people don't have a clue as to the extent of the power of information in their lives. In particular, there's a big cloud hanging over the internet and the only light at the end of the tunnel is better education."

VIEWS ON SECURITY:

The pessimist
With so many technologies and industries now relying on the internet, experts have been warning of the potential dangers for some time.

As long ago as 1996, the Rand Corporation, a US military/commercial think tank, predicted that the US could be brought to its knees within eight days by a concerted strike on military and commercial IT targets.

Since last year's terrorist attacks in the US, these forecasts are being upgraded with the UK widely considered to be one of the softest potential targets of all.

The danger is two-fold. Firstly the persistent politically motivated hackers, malcontents and so-called script kiddies who increasingly use automated hacking tools to probe the internet for weak sites and servers.

In March the Government admitted there had been over 13,000 attacks against government IT infrastructure since January 1999. They were mostly blocked but still resulted in over 200 harmful intrusions.

To put the problem into context, one US Air Force base (Wright-Patterson) has recorded up to 125,000 attempted hacks in a single day.

Secondly, even if individual targets are protected, the whole network remains vulnerable. The internet is effectively held together by a series of high-speed nodes and data links; bring enough of them down (fewer than 20 would probably do the job) and the backbone could collapse.

Hostile governments and terrorist organisations, which are known to be investing heavily in cyber-war techniques, would consider this a highly desirable objective, and the beauty of cyber-war is that a tiny country without the means to build an army could cause far more damage by digital means.

The optimist
That's all hot air. The experts have heard all this before. Don't forget that the internet was designed to be able to survive a nuclear strike. It has flexibility built in.

As Shaw says: "The internet was designed to be multi-faceted, multi-faced, multi-nodal. It's more resilient that people give it credit for.

"Meanwhile, technology is moving towards providing secure environments, people are more aware of the threats and law enforcement agencies are becoming more effective. These are serious guys and they ain't stupid."

Indeed, with antivirus experts doubling up as consultants for the FBI, and companies such as Symantec (makers of the popular Norton Antivirus range) spending over 15 per cent of their turnover on research and development, there is a good chance that the days of bored malcontents playing in the big league is coming to an end.

As a Symantec representative put it: "Symantec takes a long view of the industry to keep ahead of trends and plan for whatever the next technology may bring.

"Our researchers are brighter than most virus writers, many of whom are 'script kiddie' youngsters cutting and pasting code together, requiring no real programming skill. We haven't been beaten yet!"

Reasons to be fearful

• Email could be rendered unusable with the volume of spam overtaking legitimate messages within five years.
• Large areas of the internet will become no-go zones for women and minors because of the rising problem of pests and perverts.
• Viruses will increase in sophistication, becoming self-activating (so you won't need to open them) and also targeting mobile phones and handheld computers.
• The hardware that makes up the internet's backbone is vulnerable to attack, either by terrorists or malcontents.
• Online privacy will be undermined by spyware, security and stalkers.
• File sharing and piracy will decimate the availability of free, original content.
• Wallet schemes such as Microsoft's Passport, where your personal details are held on your computer to be used when necessary, will mean that one hacker can more easily compromise thousands of websites and affect millions of customers at once.
• Denial of service attacks will regularly bring major internet sites and networks to a standstill.
• Society's growing reliance on networks and computers means that all areas of life can now be paralysed by a single glitch.
• Online fraud is on the increase. When you can no longer tell the rogues from the retailers, what will become of ecommerce?

PRIVACY ON PARADE:

The pessimist
Privacy is not just at risk from spying software or corporate negligence, such as when an online bank accidentally reveals your details to others. The biggest danger comes from other users.

Pests have made chat rooms and instant messaging all but unusable for many women, who must either bar all strangers or risk unwanted attention or abuse.

Then there is the cyber-stalker, a chat room prowler who follows other users from site to site or out into the real world via phone or address records stored online. The website www.haltabuse.org reports 100 new cases every week.

Janet Reno, US Attorney General, has said: "Assuming that the proportion of cyber-stalking victims is even a fraction of the proportion of persons who have been the victims of offline stalking within the preceding 12 months, there may potentially be hundreds of thousands of victims of recent cyber-stalking incidents."

Unchecked, the end result will be that people will only use the internet with fake identification, never trusting anyone they meet online.

The optimist
All forms of communication have been abused at one time or another. Remember video nasties, obscene phone calls and hate mail. Although these problems still exist and cause genuine distress, methods of combating them have improved and legislation has tightened to punish the guilty.

The internet is still a young medium and such precautions are still being developed, but in time they will arrive.

Already high-profile campaigns, like the recent police operation Ore which targeted online paedophiles, has shown that snooping technology can be used to our advantage. Furthermore, security and filtering software is already in place to protect us if used correctly.

Finally, as the internet moves to a pay-as-you-go model, moderated chat rooms and better policing of sites and communities will also increase, making the bigger sites and portals safer places in which to browse.