Thousands of ordinary users will plug into Broadband
Britain this Christmas, says Simon Moores, and they haven't a hope
of keeping the internet bandits out
I had just returned from towing an advertising banner
behind an aircraft over Kent, when I happened to read a headline in
Computer Weekly: “Banner ads the latest target of worm
attacks”.
It struck me then that traditional forms of unconventional
advertising probably looked rather safer to the consumer than the
risk of being lured to a rogue advertisement on the internet with a
hidden payload of misery waiting for whoever happened to click on
it.
The sheer number of exploits now aimed at advertising sites must
come as a worry to the industry. After all, when even reputable,
brand-name sites are revealed to be carrying malicious code,
sensible consumers are going to think twice before opening any
advertisement on the internet these days.
With the Christmas holiday only two weeks away, the sales are
already in full swing at the big computer warehouses. PCs are very
much in the household commodity range and many businesses can
reasonably expect their employees to own a broadband-connected PC
at home in much the same way as they would expect them to have a
television and a dishwasher.
This Christmas, we can expect to see another surge in PC
ownership and tens of thousand of families becoming constituent
members of Broadband Britain. But this rapid growth in connectivity
is also likely to fuel a proportionately aggressive increase in
efforts to attack and exploit anyone connected to the internet.
Regardless of all the efforts of industry and government, the
bulk of the population simply cannot be expected to be
computer-literate enough to avoid the dangers of life on the
information superhighway. Not one of my immediate friends and
family outside of the IT industry has a real clue as to how to
protect their system other than by relying on pre-installed
anti-virus software, which is invariably out of date.
Recently Avantgarde, a San Francisco marketing company, asked
the legendary superhacker-turned-consultant Kevin Mitnick and Ryan
Russell, author of Hack Proofing Your Network, to perform an
experiment. They connected six “honeypot” computers to the internet
using broadband DSL connections and then monitored them for two
weeks. The results will come as a sobering lesson to all of us.
Over the two-week period, 305,922 break-in attempts were logged.
One PC with Windows XP (SP1) was compromised in less than four
minutes and recorded 139,024 break-in attempts, averaging 341
attacks an hour. A very good reason, unless you happen to be the
Department of Work and Pensions, to make damn sure you are at least
using Window XP Service Pack 2.
The machine they tested that had SP2 loaded recorded 1,386
break-in attempts, averaging fewer than four an hour. And when they
placed a ZoneAlarm firewall in front of this, the figure dropped to
848 break-in attempts - an average of two an hour.
The moral of the experiment is that Service Pack 2 visibly and
dramatically increases your odds of survival. But that is where the
security should start and not where it ends, as the consumer so
often thinks. Firewalls should be mandatory. Sadly they will remain
a mystery to the greater part of the PC-owning population.
Setting the world to rights with the collected thoughts and
opinions of leading industry analyst Dr Simon Moores of
Zentelligence.
Acting globally, Zentelligence (Research) advises
governments, suppliers, business and the media on the evolution,
application and delivery of leading-edge technologies, and
specialises in the areas of e-government and information
security.
For further information on Zentelligence and its research,
presentation and analyst services, visitwww.zentelligence.com