Internet poses too many risks

Published 3:02 pm Saturday, March 16, 2013

I just cannot understand why our key government agencies and companies have given themselves to the Internet. Obviously the Internet is valuable for exchanging some information, but to trust all of their critical data to cyberspace is absolutely insane. There is no cryptology or firewall that can protect them from an assertive attack by the computer experts in China and elsewhere. These guys know how the guts of computers and cyberspace work. They can hack around the most abstruse passwords and firewalls. An example of this insanity was Israel’s rubbishing of Iran’s computers that controlled their uranium enrichment machines. Why on earth would these computers be hooked to the Internet?

Similarly, masses of critical engineering data from making airplanes to manufacturing zippers is in the “cloud.” Controlling the electric grid and exchanging vast sums of money, stocks and bonds now depends on the Internet. Ninety percent of these data has no business being on the World Wide Web. Companies should unplug their computers from it and set up private internal networks; using the Internet only to communicate. Before the internet craze a spy had to somehow gain entrance to a company or agency, find the room where the data is stored, find the drawer or cabinet then photograph what he was looking for (a very time consuming and risky job).

Now, the expert hackers can gain entry to all of a company’s secrets and download the lot in a few micro-seconds. The risk is multiplied by the fact that every employee these days has a computer that can access the Web. Thousands of company computers and each one a security threat. It’s absolutely unbelievable that the government and industry can’t see this. Instead of unplugging their computers from the “net” they spend millions of dollars in a vain hope of finding the unbreakable firewall. Crazy.

Roger Sayer

Mukilteo