THE INTERNET AGE

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

These opening lines of the popular classic A Tale of Two Cities pretty much describe the Internet Age today. Be it the excessive hacking which threatens national security, personal and financial information to the failure of the Anti-virus Industry to come up with solutions to the ever increasing malicious software doing its rounds on the net, the Internet has opened new frontiers for which we are in no way prepared. And if this was not enough, it would be even more startling to know the Internet Industrys well-guarded secret of prominent websites servers guzzling energy equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear reactors for storing the billions of bytes of information around the world without having effective measures to protect it. Phew, we definitely seem to be sitting on a potential time bomb!! The IT boom has made the whole world a global village. As a result of which, countries are now connected to each other through business, entertainment, awareness and education. It is no longer difficult to contact anybody from anywhere all you need is an Internet connection and few clicks of the mouse. Over the last 10 years, the Internets usage has increased manifold, but with every good story, comes a villain. And in this case, it is criminal hackers. There has been an alarming increase in the number of cyber-crime cases, be it hacking e-mail accounts, stealing sensitive data, copying address books, intercepting data, cracking passwords, Trojan attacks or espionage in recent years. Cyber-crime has come to threaten personal, societal and national security. Hacking means exploring a computers designed features, and learning how to exploit or take advantage of those features. Although the situation is grim for companies, the situation has given an immeasurable boost to the career of Ethical hackers. Even in India frequent news about hackers surfaces up which is quickly swept under the carpet by the government agencies unable to implement protective measures. Chinese hackers have constantly posed a threat to India and are suspected that they have been sharing information with Pakistan and other anti-national elements. From a layman point of view perhaps, a bigger concern would be hacking into bank accounts and the like and stealing of sensitive personal, financial and professional information. The increasing incidents of online fraud and hacking have put banks in a difficult position. Phishers are becoming more and more sophisticated and phishing mails have begun to appear in Hindi too,

targeting the growing numbers of regional language Internet users. Also, it seems that the law applying to the loss of money in an Internet banking transaction is tilted against the banks because of the lack of well-defined IT Laws in our country. Recently, in the US, large companies such as Sony and Citibank have been hacked and passwords of millions of users stolen. Although such an incident has not happened in India, probably because hacker-criminals in India are not sophisticated enough as yet, international criminals could turn their gaze towards India anytime soon. According to a recent article in The New York Times, although consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on Anti-Virus software, these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses because the virus creators move too quickly. A new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, California, and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. Amichai Shulman, Impervas chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 anti-virus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent. The main problem companies claim is that anti-virus products are inherently reactive. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, anti-virus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its signature unique signs in its code before they can write a program that removes it. This may take a few days to many years. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years. For the users who admire internet giants like Google, Facebook, Yahoo! etc. for their image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness, their data centers, by design, consuming vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, would be a sharp contrast. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 per cent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times has found. To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show. So now the choice rests with us, do we want to completely submit ourselves to the Internet Age or do we retrospect and try to live off the digital grid for at least some part of our lives?

- samarth goel , 3 Year, EEE , NITK, Surathkal

RD