The Internet Is Owned

Have you gotten the feeling lately that the Internet is owned? By that I mean that various mafia and gangs (according to recent reports) are on the Internet making a business out of extortion and phishing scams, and they're infecting and using zombie PCs to hide their tracks. And if it's not them, it's the North Korean and Chinese militaries -- these addresses appear on my routers as attacks more than anything else. I swear that they have systems in place that run down a series of IP addresses, looking for PCs to own. When they find all of a sudden that they can't own that PC or server, they then attack it with as many packets as they can to prevent it from functioning properly.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the guys at the top level domains, which pretty much run the Internet's main tasks, care nothing about this. They used to care, but I don't think they have the incentive anymore -- it's just too much work. They don't appear to be using systems to block such attacks and I know this because my firewall on my DSL is being hammered daily now. Thank goodness I use 3 firewalls. It's frustrating, however, because these guys knock out my DSL modem and one of my firewalls, and I have to reboot them 3-4 times a day now. As well, I also reimage the firewall just to ensure that it hasn't been owned, and I also put lots of rules on it that normally thwart bad guys.

Too often than not I am over at houses of friends who are not so capable with PCs. They're being hacked to death and even on new PCs. Instead of recognizing that they have a problem, they just call the PC slow or broken, or they complain about popups as if they're gnats, not realizing the real security flaw they have. They think it's easy to just plug in their DSL modems without a firewall and get right on the Internet without worry. They purchase their new PCs with virus protection and most often don't even recognize when it's been disabled or the OEM-freeware time period expiration has run out. They let their kids get on these PCs with the notoriously insecure Internet Explorer instead of the more secure Firefox, as well as download and install stuff that looks fun but is actually a trojan horse that delivers viruses and keystroke loggers. One site a neighbor went to had a skateboard game, supposedly. After that kid downloaded the EXE and ran it, he started having fun enjoying it. Little did he know that the PC virus scanner reported keystroke loggers all over the PC but the repair process had long been disabled by some other virus. The EXE, you see, was a trojan horse.

Folks, we simply must move to a new system. This just isn't working anymore. We need an Internet2B, and not the doomed Internet2 project that's already out there and which is dying in the crib. We need something with better protections built in so that the mob can no longer own the Internet.

Oh, and don't wait on Microsoft to fix this.