2.9 Computer Viruses and The Black Plague


2.9 Computer Viruses and The Black Plague

At the end of the tenth century, the population greeted the new millennium with anxiety. Religious cults with suicidal tendencies, nervous financial markets and the promise of an uncertain future created a mixed sense of wonderment and dread. This phenomenon is experienced to a greater extent or lesser degree at the turn of each century. In the Middle Ages, society at the turn of the fifteenth century did not experience this sensation. Rather, survivors of the Black Death were happy to be alive, and the change in social structure experienced by the elevation in value of the peasant class allowed the vast population of the late medieval period to embrace the new century with a feeling of self-worth and a sense of hope.

Today our technology-based civilization met the birth of the new millennium and the twenty-first century with a sense of trepidation. Technology organizations were unsure whether the change of the century and date-calculating routines might wreak havoc on financial and business transactions. To prevent the problem, they spent millions of dollars to correct the potential Y2K disaster. Fuelled by the initial media hype, consulting organizations capitalized on this opportunity by placing doubt in their client’s minds that their computer systems might not work. Harvesting this bonanza of a once-in-a-lifetime revenue opportunity, and armed with an arsenal of tools, consulting organizations proclaimed that they could help most companies through this transition. With hindsight, business now wonders if it was all worth it. The same can be said of the new plague in our technological, global lives: computer viruses. Organizations are starting to look at ways of hedging their bets by going to insurance companies to underwrite the risk associated with systems not working when hackers breach corporate firewalls or users inadvertently introduce destructive computer viruses. The next predictable behaviour will be the legions of attorneys braced for the liability litigations that will ensue from corporations with problems because of poor programming and incomplete work. Consider for a moment the record of the quality of software applications and defects accomplished by the software industry. Considering the variability in software quality and the ever-increasing threat of Internet security breaches, it is surprising there have been no large-scale cyberspace bank robberies yet. There have been numerous individual cases of fraud, identified theft and errors that have been attributed to glitches in computer programming, but so far no emergence of web-based bank robbers to rival the folklore of the American Wild West. However, what is looming on the horizon is the new threat of cyberterrorism or eTerrorism, which to date has been linked to isolated cases of virus proliferation but is destined to become a widespread problem representative of the darker side of disintermediation. For more on cyber crimes, see section 4.5.




Thinking Beyond Technology. Creating New Value in Business
Thinking Beyond Technology: Creating New Value in Business
ISBN: 1403902550
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 77

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