There’s some pretty serious warfare on the Net right now.
I’m little more than a power user, not a real hacker or professional technician. I have a computer ministry, but it’s mostly mundane stuff any power user could fix. But I enjoy helping people and making house calls is kind of fun for me. I enjoy explaining complicated stuff to people of limited understanding. I especially enjoy spawning new power users by helping duffers get smarter.
So with my limited understanding of the Internet, it looks to me like some pretty heavy stuff happening right now. It’s not what folks typically think of as “cyber warfare” but it’s even uglier in how it hurts innocent people. That’s what bothers me most about it.
Criminal hackers are finding new ways to cause havoc. New vulnerabilities keep surfacing, some with serious repercussions for everyone simply trying to use the Net. The whole thing right now depends on a handful of authorities verifying certain things and the rest of us taking their word for it. We have no idea what’s going on in the background, but if our browser shows a page, we figure it’s what we asked for. If we get a login page, we just assume it’s the right one and type in our username and password. There’s about a dozen easy ways to hijack that process. Not just phishing with fake login pages, but ways to fool us so that our computer believes it, or even fooling our ISP into believing it.
The NSA is playing tricks, trying to spook people so they don’t trust encryption, anonymizers, VPNs, and all the other ways we might try to dodge their snooping. An awful lot of virus and spyware junk is actually produced and planted out there by the US government. And then there’s the likes of DEA snooping on the Net and not even telling the judge how they got an investigation rolling from that. And the FBI is now known to plant child porn on places just so they can trick unwary users into downloading it, then arresting them. They even disguise it as something else to catch people not even looking for any kind of porn at all. Silly kids simply looking for music get trapped by this stuff.
Meanwhile, the really big dogs on the Internet porch are fighting over ways to make advertising income and perfectly willing to use spyware and rootkits so they can get virtual ownership of your computer. And who can forget all the nasty crap used by folks who think they have the right to control every copy of something they already sold?
And the vigilantes are slapping back at big and important people and agencies, and we can never be too sure some of them aren’t government agencies playing head games again. Some character named Guccifer has been having a lot of fun cracking the personal accounts of bigshots all over the place.
The cost of using the Internet now has little to do with paying in your local currency for access and purchasing a few protective services. That won’t do any more; you have to be a pretty serious security technician just to surf the Net these days. It’s almost as difficult as it was in the old days of DOS and bulletin boards. And just about anything, including old DOS, is more secure than any version of Windows. At the same time, a great many products and services, even government services, just about require you have Net access to get much of anything.
It’s all about to come crashing down, in the sense it’s not far from being unusable.
I am aware the serious protocol experts have been engaging in some serious talks for quite some time. On the one hand, they’d like to fix some of this to alleviate the stress it’s putting on them and everyone else who really knows what’s going on. For every one that says it’s all going to be just fine, it seems there’s at least three more saying things are not good, not good at all. And then they say stuff that’s over my head, so I’m not really following the details, but I do get the sense of some scrambling to come up with something they can all agree on and see if it can be saved. Part of the problem is so very many of them aren’t working for the good of mankind, but trying to protect someone who’s paying their salary. On the other hand, a significant number are already building alternative networking systems from scratch.
I’m watching, but I’m powerless to do much. I believe I can keep my systems working in this atmosphere, but I can’t fix something like a compromised Border Gateway Protocol, since that’s all at the ISP level. I’m trying to keep track of the tricks both government crooks and non-government crooks use to snare us. Mostly I’m doing a lot of praying. This Internet thing is the bulk of my pastoral ministry right now. I’m not afraid of having to give it up, but then I’ll need to know what comes next.
