Hackers warned the Internet would be a security disaster. Nobody listened.

[mfcorey1]

The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill’s most powerful lawmakers weren’t graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.

Your computers, they told the panel of senators in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don’t care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.

“If you’re looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be,” said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down “by any of the seven individuals seated before you” with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes.

The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely, making clear that they understood the gravity of the situation. “We’re going to have to do something about it,” Thompson said.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/hackers-warned-the-internet-would-be-a-security-disaster-nobody-listened/ar-AAbXhHf

[Auggie]

1. Scientists warned air pollution would be an ecological disaster. Nobody listened.

[Xipe Totec]

2. We’re going to have to do something about it. nt

[bemildred]

3. Yes, we did, I could see it in 1992, but all they could see was the automation,

all the jobs they could get rid of or make pay a lot less.

[jtuck004]

4. Big tubes. Full o' cats. n/t

[War Horse]

5. That was a good read

A trip down memory lane, in many ways.

[Stevepol]

6. Sounds like what happens when computer experts tell Conogressmen

that electronic voting machines are, as one expert puts it, "trivially easy to hack."

Ho-hum. Wake me up when there's a new election to steal.

[Wilms]

8. You're upsetting people, Steve.

[cprise]

7. Thousands of us have been saying Microsoft is irresponsible

...over many, many years. "Oh, these technicians like their weird little digs at Microsoft, don't they? And don't they know what hand is feeding them?" But to know MS products is to hate them.

And for all their vaunted research, they still do not have a firm grasp of computer security.

OTOH, the European Union recently started recommending an operating system called Qubes to keep your computer private and secure (but it is not yet as easy to use as Windows). Qubes takes a number of PC security features that were used or created by Microsoft in lazy/corrupt ways and cobbles them together into a fundamentally new internal structure that is much more solid.

Computer engineers keep forgetting that all security on a network flows from "endpoint security" - which is about making computers and storage devices able to withstand abuse. PCs, of course, are the ultimate endpoints since they are very powerful and make juicy targets. Unless we make PCs better, the Internet is unlikely to improve.

[rock]

9. As I've said before

If a glacier was headed for the Capitol, the Senators and Congressmen would be doomed. There is no chance they could manage to escape such a disaster, though they may be able to get a couple of tax reduction bills passed.