“In a small town where people never locked their doors,
would we praise the first burglar for showing the towns people
how foolish it was to leave their houses open?
After it happened, the town couldn’t ever go back to open doors.”
(Clifford Stoll)
Nowadays more and more people think that our World is becoming a huge Web, where modern technologies and the Internet dominate our daily lives. And what do you think about it?
Let’s imagine our society 20 years ago. The Internet just started to appear in our country, mainly in high governmental and military organs and much later among ordinary people. So, at the very beginning people were bonded together by trust and cooperation, they had common goals and interests. People were using the Internet not for frolicking, but for achieving certain results in their jobs and researches. It was like a small town where everyone knew each other and nobody locked their virtual doors.
But time has changed and the Internet has become available for most of people. It has become a popular means of passing on information, exchanging music and videos, organizing conferences etc. The widespread use of the Internet was a major breakthrough in many areas of human activities. However, new approaches have started to lead new problems and worries. The reason of this anxiety was caused by the first viruses and the first attempts of hacking. Hackers were like the first burglars sowing distrust and uncertainty in absolutely safe and quite towns.
Currently our society, becoming a fragile community of people, depends so much on the computers that the question of the Internet security has become a sore point.
People whose computers or e-mails have been cracked even once are interested to know more about hackers, what drives them to sneak into computer systems and to play tricks with them. Certainly, they are people without any peculiar set of ethics, who have no qualms. They exploit the weak points in our defenses, forcing us to...