untangling_the_web

DID: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIEDJ1FO~Ol-l-lelJ8cL l:J5E ONLY
Scott MacNealy's now-infamous quote,162_"you have zero privacy anyway. Get
over it."-may no longer be an overstatement. At the very least, it should serve as a
warning to Internet users to be wary of all products and services, but especially new
ones that promise to do things faster, better, easier, and cheaper. There is almost
always a hidden cost, often in weakened security and compromised privacy.
The costs, however, are not always so "hidden." Many are affecting the bottom line
and the budgets of businesses and governments. "Dealing with viruses, spyware,
PC theft and other computer-related crimes costs U.S. businesses a
s,taggering $67.2 billion a year, according to the FBI. The FBI calculated the price
tag by extrapolating results from a survey of 2,066 organizations. The survey...found
that 1,324 respondents, or 64 percent, suffered a financial loss from computer
security incidents over a 12-month period.,,163 Furthermore, as both professionals
and individuals become more security savvy, the threats become more insidious
and therefore harder to detect and protect against. The "2007 Internet Threat
Outlook," a report by software maker CA, predicted that "malware brokers will
continue to piece together threats such as Trojan horse viruses, worms and the
many forms of spyware to hide their attacks and evade technological defenses
employed by both enterprises and consumers. With the level of professionalism
rising quickly among the most sophisticated virus distributors, CA predicts that zeroday
exploits, drive-by malware downloads and extremely intricate phishing schemes
will continue to become more dangerous and harder to detect.,,164
Especially worrisome is the proliferation of bots, the shortened version of 'robot,'
which simply refers to any software designed to dig through data. For example,
search engines use spider bots to crawl webpages to index them; there are
shopping bots that look for the best prices for consumers; bots are at the heart of
data mining, the process of finding patterns in enormous amounts of data. But "bad
bots" create a virus-like infection under the remote control of a distant computer,
network, or individual. This new threat exploits vulnerabilities in security subsystems
162 Polly Sprenger, "Sun on Privacy: Get Over It," Wired, 26 January 1999,
(14 November 2006).
163 Joris Evers, "Computer crime costs $67 billion, FBI says," CNET News.com, 19 January 2006,
(30 January 2007).
164 Matt Hines, "CA Predicts More Attacks on Experienced Users," eWeek via Yahoo News, 25
January 2007, (31 January 2007).
UNCLASSIFIEDj'jI-O~ Ol-l-lelJ8cL tJSE ONLY 515