The dark side of the web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 243

12 The dark side of the web
When he later connected the same laptop to the
Internet, the worm broke free and began replicating
itself, a step its designers never anticipated.
David E. Sanger 1
Black hats and white hats
As we have seen in Chapter 10 , the Internet was invented by the academic
research community and originally connected only a relatively small number
of university computers. What is remarkable is that this research project has
turned into a global infrastructure that has scaled from thousands of research-
ers to billions of people with no technical background. However, some of the
problems that plague today's Internet originate from decisions taken by the
original Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This was a small group of
researchers who debated and decided Internet standards in a truly collegial
and academic fashion. For a network connecting a community of like-minded
friends and with a culture of trust between the universities, this was an accept-
able process. However, as the Internet has grown to include many different
types of communities and cultures it is now clear that such a trusting approach
was misplaced.
One example is the IETF's definition of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
(SMTP) for sending and receiving email over the Internet. Unfortunately, the
original SMTP protocol did not check that the sender's actual Internet address
was what the email packet header claimed it to be. This allows the possibility
of spoofing , the creation of Internet Protocol (IP) packets with either a forged
source address or using an unauthorized IP address. Such spoofing is now
widely used to mask the source of cyberattacks over the Internet, both by crim-
inal gangs as well as by governments.
It is difficult to predict the consequences of any new technology. Along
with benefits there are often some downsides that later emerge. One such
downside was the emergence of spam emails. Spam consists of unsolicited
commercial emails that are now sent out to millions of email users in a bulk
mailing. The email spam costs the spammer very little to send and even if
only a tiny percentage of recipients respond it can be a very profitable busi-
ness. One of the first spam emails was sent to the ARPANET community by
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