http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6298641.stm
Criminals 'may overwhelm the web'
By Tim Weber
Business editor, BBC News website, Davos
Criminals controlling millions of personal computers are threatening
the internet's future, experts have warned.
Up to a quarter of computers on the net may be used by cyber
criminals in so-called botnets, said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of
the internet.
Technology writer John Markoff said: "It's as bad as you can imagine,
it puts the whole internet at risk."
The panel of leading experts was discussing the future of the
internet at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Internet pandemic
Mr Cerf, who is one of the co-developers of the TCP/IP standard that
underlies all internet traffic and now works for Google, likened the
spread of botnets to a "pandemic".
Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100
and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.
Despite all that, the net is still working, which is pretty amazing.
It's pretty resilient
Vint Cerf
Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious
hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-
called Trojan virus programs.
While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of
tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail
campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.
Net resilience
Mr Markoff, who writes for the New York Times, said that a single
botnet at one point used up about 15% of Yahoo's search capacity.
It used retrieved random text snippets to camouflage messages so that
its spam e-mail could get past spam filters.
"Despite all that, the net is still working, which is amazing. It's
pretty resilient," said Mr Cerf.
The expert panel, among them Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers,
and Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International
Telecommunication Union, agreed that a solution had to be found to
ensure the survival of the web.
But its members were unsure about feasible solutions, even though
they identified operating systems and authentication as key issues.
It was still too easy for net criminals to hide their tracks, several
panel members said, although they acknowledged that it was probably
not desirable that every individual was definitively identifiable.
"Anonymity has its value, and it has its risk," said Jonathan
Zittrain, professor for internet governance at the University of Oxford.
Closing doors
Operating systems like Microsoft Windows, meanwhile, still made it
too easy for criminals to infiltrate them, the experts said.
Microsoft had done a good job improving security for its latest
operating system, Windows Vista, said Mr Markoff.
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
It's a known threat, but the numbers I heard today are staggering.
Tim Weber, BBC News website business editor in Davos
But already pirated copies of Vista were circulating in China, even
though the consumer launch of Vista has been scheduled for next Tuesday.
Experience showed that about 50% of all pirated Windows programs came
with Trojans pre-installed on them, Mr Markoff said.
Mr Dell said the future might bring "disposable virtual PCs",
accessed through the internet, that would minimise the threat of a
persistent virus infection.
Mr Toure said that whatever the solution, the fight against botnets
was a "war" that could only be won if all parties - regulators,
governments, telecoms firms, computer users and hardware and software
makers - worked together.
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