How did We Get From Adam to the Internet?


How did We Get From Adam to the Internet?[6]

The use of the Tofflers' model of technological evolution provides a useful framework for discussing changes arising from the impact of the technology generally, and the Internet specifically. The model begins by describing the Agricultural Age that lasted from about the time of Adam until about 1745 in the United States.[7] Manual labor and a focus on accumulating a minimum food surplus to allow for governance characterized this long period. During this time, technological progress was very limited, slow, and laborious. The major lack of understanding of even the most basic concepts of science impeded progress. Warfare, although common, was generally short in duration and was often decided by major battles or campaigns lasting less than a year, with some exceptions such as the Hundred Years' War and the Crusades. Although large armies were possible (at one point the Roman Empire fielded more than 700,000 soldiers), there were limited and relatively ineffective methods for communicating and controlling more than a small percentage of these forces. Runners and horse-borne message couriers supplemented by flags and other visual media were the major methods of remote communication.

The "Industrial Age," in the United States, lasted a much shorter time, only from approximately 1745 until about 1955.[8] The defining event of the Industrial Age was the introduction of the steam engine, which allowed mechanical equipment to replace muscle-powered efforts of both humans and animals. These devices introduced a new and much accelerated pace of technical innovation. During this 200-year period, there was a dramatic expansion of human knowledge and understanding of the basic principles of physical science. Enhanced agriculture allowed nations to accumulate huge food surpluses. Upon foundation of the food surplus, the nation-states increased their power, which was driven by mass production. Mass production of weapons and the mass slaughter of both combatants and noncombatants characterized the conflicts of this period.

Communications technology evolved from primitive signaling involving lanterns and reflected lights (heliograph) to supplement the continued use of human couriers, whether riding horses, trains, or waterborne craft. The inventions of the telegraph in the early 1800s followed in the late 1890s by the telephone and then by wireless radio in the early 1900s were essential evolutionary steps toward today's telecommunications infrastructure.

The "Information Age" in the United States, according to the Tofflers, began about 1955, which is the first year that the number of white-collar employees exceeded the number in blue-collar production jobs. This has been the era with the most explosive growth in human knowledge. More has been discovered in the past 50 years in both science and engineering than in the thousands of years of recorded human history. In the information age, knowledge is growing exponentially.

The pace of evolution in communications and other technologies accelerated during the early years of the Information Age with the advent of satellites, fiber-optic connections, and other high-speed and high-bandwidth telecommunications technologies.

It is in the context of this phenomenal growth of technology and human knowledge that the Internet arises as one of the mechanisms to facilitate sharing of information and as a medium which encourages global communications. According to the United States General Accounting Office, in a report to Congress,[9] the rapid developments of telecommunications infrastructure in the United States resulted in creation of three separate and frequently incompatible communications networks:

  • Wire-based voice and data telephone networks;

  • Cable-based video networks; and

  • Wireless voice, data, and video networks.

Birth of the Internet[10]

The global collection of networks which evolved in the late 20th century, and continue to evolve in the 21st century, to become the Internet represent what could be described as a "global nervous system" transmitting from anywhere to anywhere facts, opinions, and opportunity. However, when most security and law enforcement professionals think of the Internet, it seems to be something either vaguely sinister or of such complexity that it is difficult to understand. Popular culture, as manifested by Hollywood and network television programs, does little to dispel this impression of danger and out-of-control complexity.

The Internet arose out of projects sponsored by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the United States in the 1960s. It is perhaps one of the most exciting legacy developments of that era. Originally an effort to facilitate sharing of expensive computer resources and enhance military communications, over the 10 years from about 1988 until 1998 it rapidly evolved from its scientific and military roots into one of the premier commercial communications media. The Internet, which is described as a global meta-network, or network of networks,[11] provides the foundation upon which the global information superhighway will be built.

However, it was not until the early 1990s that Internet communication technologies became easily accessible to the average person. Prior to that time, Internet accesses required mastery of many arcane and difficult-to-remember programming language codes. However, the combination of declining microcomputer prices, enhanced microcomputer performance, and the advent of easy-to-use browser[12] software created the foundation for mass Internet activity. When these variables aligned with the developing global telecommunications infrastructure, they allowed a rare convergence of capability.

It has now become a simple matter for average people, even those who had trouble programming their VCRs, to obtain access to the global Internet, and with the access search the huge volume of information it contains. The most commonly accessed application on the Internet is the World Wide Web (Web). Originally developed in Switzerland, the Web was envisioned by its inventor as a way to help share information. The ability to find information concerning virtually any topic via search engines from among the rapidly growing array of Web servers is an amazing example of how the Internet increases the information available to nearly everyone. One gains some sense of how fast and pervasive the Internet has become as more TV, radio, and print advertisements direct prospective customers to visit their business or government agency Web sites.

An important fact to understand, and which is of supreme importance for security and law enforcement professionals, is that the Web is truly global in scope. Physical borders as well as geographical distance are almost meaningless in "cyberspace"; the distant target is as easily attacked as a local one. This is an important concept for security and law enforcement professionals to understand because it will affect their ability to successfully do their jobs. The annihilation of time and space makes the Internet an almost perfect environment for the Internet robbers. When finding a desired server located on the other side of the planet is as easy and convenient as calling directory assistance to find a local telephone number, Internet robbers have the potential to act in ways that we can only begin to imagine. The potential bonanza awaiting the Internet robber, who is undeterred by distance, borders, time, or season, is a chilling prospect for those who are responsible for safeguarding the assets of a business or government agency. As the ISSO, you have responsibility for deterring these miscreants, as well as helping security and law enforcement personnel investigate them.

"Future Shock"

With appreciation for the Tofflers' book Future Shock, the reaction of people and organizations to the dizzying pace of Internet progress has been mixed. Although some technologically sophisticated individuals and organizations have been very quick to exploit the potential of this new technology, many have been slower, adopting more of a wait-and-see posture. The rapid pace of evolution of the Internet does raise some questions as to how much a society can absorb, and how much can actually be used to benefit organizations in such a compressed time frame. Sometimes lost in the technological hype concerning the physical speed of Internet-enabled communications or the new technologies that are making it easier to display commercial content is the reality of the Internet's greatest impact: It provides unprecedented access to information. The access is unprecedented in terms of the total volume of information that is moving online and may be tapped for decision making.

It also is unprecedented when we consider the increasing percentage of the world's population that enjoys this access. More and more information moves online and becomes available to more and more people, causing fundamental changes in how we communicate, do business, and think of the world we live in. Consequently, there are also fundamental changes in how criminals and miscreants commit crimes.

Throughout much of human history, the educated elites of every culture have jealously guarded their knowledge. Access to knowledge, whether in written or spoken form, was often the source of the elite's privileged position and often allowed them to dominate or control the great uninformed masses of uneducated humanity—information was and is still a means to power. "Outsiders" were never granted accesses to the store of wisdom unless they were inducted into the privileged elite. Now, however, the average Internet traveler, wherever resident, with little more than a fast modem and a mediocre microcomputer, can access, analyze, and/or distribute information around the world on almost any topic.

Some pundits have concluded that we now live in an era where there are "no more secrets." By some estimates, early in this century there will be more information published and available online than has ever been accessible in all the libraries on earth. How this torrent of information will be managed to ensure that Internet robbers do not wreak havoc and dominate the Internet, or have power over others, is now (or should be) the primary objective of every security and law enforcement professional whose business or government agency travels the Internet.

Roadmap for the Internet

The Internet can be compared in some ways to a roadmap for a superhighway. Some basic examples will help explain it in common terms.

When multiple computers (whether microcomputers or larger) are linked together by various communications protocols to allow digital information to be transmitted and shared among the connected systems, they become a network. The combination of tens of thousands of organizational networks interconnected with high-capacity "backbone" data communications and the public telephone networks now constitutes the global Internet. However, there is a major difference in this environment that is important to consider for security and law enforcement professionals.

When the isolated by-ways of individual business or government agency networks become connected to the global Internet, they become an "off-ramp" accessible to other Internet travelers. The number and diversity of locations that provide Internet "on-ramps" is vast and growing. Today, one can access the Internet from public libraries, cyber-caf s in many cities around the world, even kiosks in some airports. These and other locations provide Internet on-ramps to anyone who has a legitimate account—or an Internet robber can hijack one from an authorized user.

Typically a business or government agency will use centrally controlled computers, called servers, to store the information and the sophisticated software applications used to manage and control its information flow. These systems could be equated to a superhighway interchange.

Commonly business and government agency networks are considered private property and the information they contain as proprietary for the exclusive use of the organization. These business and government agency networks are connected to large networks operated by Internet service providers (ISPs) such as UUNET, GTE, AOL, and AT&T, who provide the equivalent of toll roads and turnpikes—the highways for the flow of information.

The Internet: No Traffic Controls

The Internet challenges the security and law enforcement professional with an array of new and old responsibilities in a new environment. From the perspective of managing risks, this new access to information creates new kinds of dangers to businesses and government agencies. It also allows well-understood security issues to recur in new or unique ways. No longer can organizations assume they will obtain any security through obscurity, no matter where they are physically located. In other words, because there is an Internet off-ramp, they will be visible to Internet robbers. Everything from a nation's most critical defense secrets to business information is vulnerable to easy destruction, modification, and compromise by unauthorized Internet travelers.

Too often careless managers fail to take adequate measures to safeguard sensitive information, which results in premature disclosure with attendant adverse impact. The major part of the controllable risk arises from inadvertent disclosure to the ever-vigilant eyes of Internet robbers and others, such as competitive intelligence analysts with Internet access.

When the Internet was limited to scientists, academic researchers, and government employees, such a collaborative framework was probably a very cost-effective means of controlling the virtual world. However, in the early 1990s, for the first time there were more commercial sites than educational and governmental sites using the Internet. Since that time matters have become increasingly complex. The informal array of social sanctions and technical forums for cooperation is no longer capable of ensuring a modicum of civilized behavior.

What Has Been the Impact of the Internet?

It is apparent that the Internet has rapidly become a significant element in modern society, figuring in advertising, films, and television, even facilitating the rapid dissemination of investigative reports involving a U.S. president. The Internet has provided many additional information services, and they are all becoming easier to access. The two primary new avenues for increased volume of information access are the Web browser and net-enabled e-mail. This increased access to information has been principally an advantage for law-abiding citizens and legitimate businesses, but it also offers both hardened and prospective Internet robbers new, high-speed venues for perpetrating their crimes and schemes.

Almost everyone working in America has been exposed to some form of computer technology. From the front-line retail clerk at the local fast-food franchise, to the Wall Street analyst, to the farmer planning his crop rotations, individual work performance has been substantially enabled by the widespread proliferation of microcomputer technologies. But the macro impacts on organizations are in some ways less remarkable than they have been for individuals. Go to any good computer store, or better yet, if you have Internet access, browse the Web sites of major microcomputer manufacturers. You will discover a wide range of systems with memory, speed, and storage capabilities that would have been descriptive of large, mainframe-type computers in the early 1980s. For example, a large regional bank in Southern California in the late 1980s operated its electronic wire/funds transfer machine with only 48 MB of RAM and 120 MB of disk storage, and the system transferred billions of dollars nightly for the bank. Now the performance of an equivalent system is available to anyone with a few thousand dollars, and the nightly transactions run to the hundreds of billions.

In business, it has become in some ways a David versus Goliath world, where the advantages do not always accrue to the organization that can field the bigger battalions. Advanced information technology was once the province exclusively of governments, the military, universities, and large corporate entities. This is no longer true. Now anyone with a modest investment in hardware and software can acquire a powerful processor and attach it to the Internet. It should be obvious that criminals and those with criminal intentions also have access to powerful information technology. The question remains: How will they use it?

As we consider the potential for criminal actions directed against organizations, it is critically important to consider these factors. The same information technology we use to manage our organizations can and will be used by savvy Internet robbers to the detriment of governments, businesses, and others.

When powerful microcomputers are networked, the communication capabilities inherent in these arrangements multiply their value. A single microcomputer standing alone is little more than a sophisticated typewriter or calculating machine. The real power comes when individual machines link together to create networks which will allow the flow of information from one person to the entire world. As a case in point, consider the story of Russia's transition from Communism. When the military coup against Gorbachev occurred in the early 1990s, the military plotters seized control of all the classic means of communication: newspapers, telephones, and radio and TV stations. However, the anti-coup forces quickly drove their message on the Internet to get word to the outside world of the situation, and timely communications played a significant part in defeating an attempt by the most powerful military and police apparatus on earth to regain power over the Russian people.

The capabilities brought to the individual by the Internet are considerable and growing almost daily. One example is the ability to sign up for investment services from low-cost brokerages and stock market advisors and enjoy the kind of timely advice that for generations has been the perquisite of the rich and powerful classes. Grass-roots political organizing and civic action are also enabled. For example, in California, a concerned parent scanned into a database and posted on a Web page the details of the state's list of sexual predators/pedophiles, thus allowing average people to determine whether there was a registered sex offender residing in their neighborhood.

From shopping for homes and automobiles, where online services promise to eliminate the brokers' monopoly of information, to traffic, weather forecasts, and directions prior to trips, the Internet is providing more information to more people every day, and we are only at the beginning of that process! The major trend here is clear: There will be more information accessible to more people than has ever been possible in the past. How this information power will be used ultimately depends on the ethics and motives of the individual: Internet robbers can use such power negatively.

Organizational Impacts

The major benefits to organizations of the Internet and related technologies are significant and far ranging. In large part, the impacts may be characterized as dramatically lower costs for transmitting and sharing information. To appreciate how far we have come, before electronic mail became ubiquitous, it took as long as a week for first-class postal mail, derisively called "snail mail" by Internet aficionados, to travel from one coast of the United States to the other. Even the fax machine, which itself was a significant improvement over postal and overnight courier services, requires dedicated fax equipment and only operates from point to point. Contrast these with the capabilities of Internet e-mail. E-mail, which may transit the globe in seconds, allows the recipients to obtain the message when it is convenient; they need not be present to receive it. Through the use of digital attachments, e-mail can carry more information in a convenient compression of transmission times.

Whereas the innocent e-mail user sees only increased speed and volume of communication, security and law enforcement professionals must understand how damaging even one message could be to a business or government agency. A single e-mail message could contain the whole strategic business plan of the organization or the source code to a break-through product, and could be transmitted anywhere on earth in a nanosecond.

To show that this threat is much more than theoretical, consider the allegations involving two leading Silicon Valley software companies, A and B. Company A accused rival Company B of theft of trade secrets and proprietary source code. Company A's management alleged as one element in their complaint that a former Company A employee used his company-provided Internet access to transfer source code of key products to his own, personal account. The employee then tendered his resignation. Upon arrival at his home-based office, the now-former Company A employee allegedly downloaded the stolen source code to his home computer system. Employed as a programmer consultant by rival startup Company B, he reportedly used the purloined source code as the foundation for a remarkably similar product created at Company B. [13]

Another example is a former employee of Company X who was accused of transmitting the source code for a new digital device to rival Company Y. This scheme apparently was discovered only by accident when the highly confidential materials created such a long message that it caused the e-mail system to crash and allowed a system administrator to discover the purported scheme.

These two incidents are drawn from press reports in the media, and it is likely that they are only the very tip of the iceberg. In fact, many organizations do not have the security systems and technologies to detect similar incidents. Because of the adverse publicity and the prospect of a lengthy criminal justice process, even those businesses and government agencies that have been victimized by Internet robbers frequently do not report similar incidents to the proper authorities.

Using the Internet to Share Information

One of the truly remarkable developments in information technology has been the widespread use of the Web browser and related technology to deliver information both to internal employees and to the external customers of an organization. If e-mail could be described as a virtual duplication of the postal services into the global Internet environment, then Web servers can be thought of as kiosks or bulletin boards. On these "virtual bulletin boards," an organization can make accessible to target populations the information they need to make decisions and perform administrative, operational, or other functions. For example, one very common intranet (internal company Internet) application is to provide a central "forms page" where employees find the most current version to be downloaded and printed for everything from payroll deductions to medical reimbursements. Another use is to front-end a database in which is stored information which must be accessible to a widely dispersed population of users or broad cross-section of Internet travelers.

More Americans go online: Even as Internet usage, satisfaction levels rise, many consumers are still worried about security[14]: NEW YORK (CNN/Money)—Americans are using and enjoying the Internet more ... even though they're still not entirely sure their personal information is secure. Sixty-one percent of all Americans go online at least once a month, compared with 59 percent at the end of 2001.... More than 35 percent of Internet users go online daily, while 15 percent go online several times a week.... More than 33 percent of the survey respondents said they'd never been online at all.

Currently the most common and growing destination for the Internet traveler is the business or government agency Web site. For the Internet traveler, Web sites are a combination of superhighway billboards, banks, shopping malls, rest stops, and even fast-food delivery services. All of these services as well as hundreds of others can be found located at the on- and off-ramps to the Internet.

These Web sites are used by businesses for advertising, public relations, and marketing, as well as to sell or deliver products or services to Internet travelers.

Web sites may contain and dispense government information concerning everything from how to prepare and submit forms, to descriptions of the most wanted criminal fugitives, to recruiting advertisements for future employees. Even the most secretive U.S. government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and others have established Web sites that provide useful information to Internet travelers.

The business and government agency Web sites are often the targets of miscreants, juvenile delinquents, and other Internet robbers. Successful attacks against these Web sites can be disruptive and destructive of the reputation of the sponsoring organization. Therefore the protection of the Web site should be an important part of the business or government agency plan for using this technology.

[6]This information was taken from the author's coauthored book, Internet Robbery: Crime on the Internet, also published by Butterworth—Heinemann.

[7]The time of the agricultural period varies by progress of individual nations.

[8]As with the Agricultural Age, dates vary for individual nations.

[9]"Information Superhighway: An Overview of Technology Challenges." GAO-AIMD 95-23, p. 12.

[10]"See the book I-Way Robbery: Crime on the Internet, published by Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000, and coauthored by Dr. Kovacich and William C. Boni, for more details about the Internet and criminal activities.

[11]"See the book I-Way Robbery: Crime on the Internet, published by Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000, and coauthored by Dr. Kovacich and William C. Boni, for more details about the Internet and criminal activities. p. 11.

[12]Software that simplifies the search and display of information supplied by the World Wide Web.

[13]Although based on actual cases, the names have not been used because the cases are still being adjudicated through the criminal justice process.

[14]See http://money.cnn.com/2002/10/16/news/internet_barometer/index.htm




The Information Systems Security Officer's Guide. Establishing and Managing an Information Protection Program
The Information Systems Security Officers Guide: Establishing and Managing an Information Protection Program
ISBN: 0750698969
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 204

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