December 10, 2024

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Crimes of Malice

Crimes of Malice

Crashing entire systems sometimes criminals are more interested in abusing or vandalizing computers and telecommunications systems than in profiting from them. For example, a student at a Wisconsin campus deliberately and repeatedly shut down a university computer system, destroying final projects for dozens of students; a judge sentenced him to a year’s probation, and he left the campus. In 2003, the website of WeaKnees, an online seller of digital video recorders, was overwhelmed by an electronic attack that knocked out its email system for weeks, the result of cyber-mercenaries allegedly hired by an entrepreneur who had been rebuffed by WeaKnees over a proposed business deal.

Other kinds of malevolent attacks could be far more serious are as follows.

Attacks or power-control systems: One possibility that concerns security specialists is cyber attacks on the nation’s water, power, transportation, and communications systems, causing them to crash and disrupting services to thousands, even millions of people. None of this has happened yet, although we have experienced region wide blackouts from power failures and natural disasters owing to other causes. Even if such systems are not the target of terrorists (who may be more interested in generating spectacular casualty counts), it must be assumed that they are vulnerable.

Attacks on the internet-could the entire not crash? Also quite worrisome is the possibility of ah attack on the internet that could actually crash the whole worldwide network. This would involve crackers’ tampering with something called the border gateway proto-col, which individual networks use to announce their routes so they can carry each other’s messages. By falsifying the announcements, a cracker could direct messages to nonexistent routes, thereby overload-ing and perhaps crashing parts of the internet.

On a few occasions, parts of a large internal networking company have been made to disappear, so that no contact could be made for several hours, which shows that a real threat may exist. The reason it hasn’t happened yet, speculates one pair of writers, is that “hackers, thieves, and terrorists have come to depend on the internet just like everyone else, and don’t want it wrecked. ” ‘