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Rage Against The Machine

Entrepreneur, Jan, 2001 by Mike Hogan

LoveBugs, Qaz and the Attack of the Zombie PCs--who's your friend in cyberspace? Nobody.

Michael Roman came home from a weekend-long conference one recent Sunday evening and noticed that there were 15 people logged on to the cable modem for his five-node business network. Only one problem: He was working alone at the time. Then he noticed that his own souped-up desktop was crawling along at a snail's pace.

The 41-year-old owner of Inhouse Appraisal Corp. in Toronto had been hacked, and computer users from locations as far away as Denmark were diligently downloading the MP3 music files he stored on his business computer.

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In his rush to get away Thursday afternoon, Roman had forgotten to disable his network's Windows File/ Print Share services, and Internet bargain hunters were pouring in through his company's always-on cable modem connection. He quickly turned off file sharing, but spent the entire next two days turning away requests-20 to 30 per minute--for access to his machine. He finally had to change his PC's Internet address. "I figure someone had posted my IP address in a newsgroup somewhere as a source for easy-listening rock," reasons Roman.

Welcome to the brave new world of widespread, often random, cyber-attacks. You may not have been singled out from the herd yet. But security experts agree the Internet has become a much more dangerous place to do business during the past year--and there's a lot more danger to come.

TARGET: YOU, ME, EVERYONE

Ron Moritz, senior vice president and chief technical officer at Symantec Corp., tells about a Southern California bank that recently spent 45 days trying to figure out how a blackmailer got into its computer network. Yes, the bank had firewall and antivirus software, but neither were installed on one executive's PC. The hacker had uncovered passwords by using a Trojan horse to record the executive's keystrokes.

This happened to a bank, but did you know that your business--and you personally--can get caught in the crosshairs, too? A couple of data points: A June audit of homebased PCs by research firm PC Data found that almost 45 percent of those who log on to the Internet from home still don't use antivirus software.

IDC estimates that the PCs in nearly 37 million American homes are used for work, ranging from telecommuting and after-hours catching up to running homebased businesses.

Does that work stay at home? No, it's almost always destined for an office PC via a floppy, portable, e-mail or dial-up connection. It doesn't matter to a hacker whether the entry point is the company network, home-office PC or laptop you carry around. And get ready for infiltrations through your PDA, cell phone and interactive TV.

When you think about it, hacking isn't really an attack on computers, but rather on the inattentiveness of the people who use them. We use computing devices everywhere, and they're mostly unprotected--even when they have protective software installed.

For example, the LoveBug virus that hit in May 2000 wasn't that technologically sophisticated, says Michael Erbschloe, vice president of research firm Computer Economics, but it caused almost $7 billion worth of damage to corporate networks in its first five days in the wild. It slid right through company firewalls and simply outran antivirus fixes by leapfrogging across an estimated 55 million computers worldwide in the first 24 hours. How? It seems we humans just can't resist opening an e-mail whose subject line reads "ILOVEYOU."

The Symantec Antivirus Research Center has counted some 48,000 viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other forms of malicious code floating around out there, and the number is increasing by about 1,000 each month. Erbschloe estimates cyberattacks cost companies about $17 billion in ruined PCs and lost productivity in 2000. But that's just a down payment.

Viruses are spawning still other forms of electronic chaos. Hacking has become so widespread, so romanticized and so easy that it no longer requires programming skills or even much time, says security consultant Jim Weaver, owner of Cyber Resources in Crestview, Florida. Hacking technology now includes field-tested and quasi-automated tools for random acts of sabotage. They can be quickly found on the Web with any search engine, downloaded and wielded by anyone who can use their point-and-click interfaces.

There are still plenty of "uber hackers" out there, says Weaver--bright, young programmers looking for a challenge or to find out "how things work." There also are "crackers," skilled people who just want to mess things up. But most hacks come from the half-willing and often unwitting wannabes the hacker elite get to do their heavy lifting.

The serious hackers make the tools available for the disgruntled or just plain venal and package them in that "screw the establishment" ethic that has proved so appealing to not-yet-enfranchised young people for the past several decades. One of the enduring axioms of the Internet is that everything on it should be free, and the fact that any of it has become commercial really rankles some hackers, notes Weaver.

Business Services Industry

Rage Against The Machine

Entrepreneur, Jan, 2001 by Mike Hogan

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