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Broadband Access Leading to Internet Breakdown?
"Spam, adware, worms and viruses are now able to propagate much faster than ever before. Worms are also growing bigger, more advanced, as it's possible to transfer more viral code in less time. It's as if slow dial-up lines acted as a kind of immune system that prevented effective propagation of worms and made DDoS attacks so much less significant.
I'm not only worried about viruses and spam levels. Part of the reason the MPAA and RIAA are taking such an interest in Internet activity is that file sharing has become so much easier with the availability of broadband, and as usual there are murmerings of regulation. Before the broadband revolution, the involvement of the MPAA and RIAA in Internet affairs was small, and their argument was less convincing.
As broadband grows, will regulation become necessary not just to prevent illegal distribution of copyrighted material but more likely to protect Internet users from themselves (we're already seeing ISPs adding spam e-mail filtering to their default services, for example)? Will the Internet fall in popularity as it becomes more and more frustrating and dangerous to use, or will we simply see a massive improvement in coding practices and more secure software?"
Starfish by Peter Watts, ISBN: 0812575857
and its sequel
Maelstrom by Peter Watts, ISBN: 0812566793
The second book focuses more on the viral evolution but they are both good books overall
...when your evil worm is 12k in size... Not like it takes that much longer for it to transfer on dial-up...
The only possible diffrence is the permanence of the connection but that is becoming rather inevitable anyways.
Yeah, and not just humans either. The worms are starting to use encryption too. Some versions of Bagle are spreading themselves in password encrypted Zip files, with the password in the message body. The pace of the arms race is incredible. Antivirus vendors then updated their scanners to scan the message body for the Zip file password and decrypt the attachment. The virus writers then started sending the password in a bitmap attachment to foil the virus scanners.
Of course that story was from 2 weeks ago so it's old news. This week the latest variant has no attachment at all. It's just HTML that exploits an IE bug that downloads the worm from the infected computer that sent the message.
I've found that most folks like to be told how to make their computers more secure and decrease their chances of infection/spyware...
I have made it standard practice to install 3 applications on all Windoze machines that I fix anything on...
1) Install Avast! Home Edition and set it to do automatic updates of both the Core Program and Virus Database. Because most people don't pay for Anti-Virus upgrades after their free trial version runs out...not to mention the fact that Avast! is better than Norton and most for-pay AV apps anyhow...
2) Install Spybot Search & Destroy and make sure that the primary user(s) see what the result of the initial scan is (shock value) with instructions on how to use the app...
3) Install FireFox (no link needed) with the follofing userContent.css...
If they still insist on using IE I will install Google Toolbar and enable popup blocking...
I then proceed to replace any spyware apps with free non-spyware apps (WeatherBug -> Weather Pulse, etc)
As for a firewall, I talked most into buying a wireless router (generally a cheap 802.11b router) to use as a firewall and future network upgrades. I don't think any windoze software firewalls are very good...IPTables is about the ONLY software firewall that I trust...
After doing this, I find that these systems stay fairly clean and have much fewer problems. Not to mention the owners of said machines tend to be much happier afterward.
I work for a small ISP, and things are absolutely improving behind the scenes. Most old broadband network designs were not built with the present day in mind. It was, perhaps, shortsighted, but who saw this coming?
We're installing dedicated spam/virus filtering machines. We're changing our network drastically, going from a very simple network structure to one where every DSL bridge's ATM channel is carried up to a router doing Proxy-ARP, so we can cut out broadcast traffic and regulate traffic for every customer's connection (cutting down on both viruses spread via broadcast traffic as well as DoS attacks).
On top of that, we police the network to find users with viruses, then call them and, if they can't do it themselves, clean their PCs for free.
Things are definitely picking up on the ISP end. Now if only the customers would take a few steps...
Well there's solutions to some of these problems, but nobody would really want to implement them.
.exe to their entire adressbook via their ISP's mail server.
Let's talk about spam and adware: Outlaw it. Why is it proving to be so hard to kick congress off their fat lazy asses and make it easier for people to smack these bitches where it hurts, their wallets? Given what happened with the do not call list you'd think this would be a piece of cake. Why is adware even permitted to exist? You'd think with all the heightened security concern that methods of running unwanted code without a user's consent or knowledge of its installation would be a major issue.
Viruses/worms/trojans: Change the way email works. Step one, NO ATTATCHMENTS. Seriously, why the hell are we using email to shuttle files around? It was not designed for this. What alternative is there for people to share files? I dunno, maybe P2P? Or maybe personal web servers? But wait, that's bad, then broadband providers would have to allow upstream that isn't horribly crippled or god forbid minor webservers on their networks. Let's look at the advantages of sending a link to a file on your machine in an email versus attatching the file:
1. Reduced mail traffic. If your mail goes out to a 100 person list, and only 5 people care to check out the file, only the bandwidth for those 5 is used.
2. Traceable distribution path. We know where the file came from, even if it's malicious code, someone is accountable for hosting it. It's just slightly harder to infect a user's machine, start up a webserver unknowingly, host a file, and trojan a link into their emails than just spew an
Peer to peer copyright infringement: Face it, it's here, it's not going away. Either make what people want to watch and hear available when they want it for a price they won't balk at, or suffer. I mean how impractical is this? Itunes doesn't seem to be having any problems. Maybe it's not so much people are unwilling to pay for a movie or a CD as they are unwilling to go down to a store and get something overpriced or find out it's out of stock. Maybe it's easier to consume TV by watching exactly the episode you want of the show you like without having to plan your day around it. Not everything downloaded is even available for sale. People want it, but companies aren't supplying it, so they're going the less than legal route to get it. There will always be piracy for any medium, people taped CDs and the radio and copied VHS tapes. P2P is just making access to content easier. If there isn't enough legal content or the access isn't easy enough, guess what people will go to instead? I would rather pay what the average monthly cable bill is and be able to search for and download whatever TV episodes or movies I wanted to watch than pay it to have to wait for them to come on so I could watch them or record them. It's not about the money.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
patches and fixes are useless beacause they come around after something happens after its already to late to prevent it. Im willing to bet that a large portion of the code in M$ Windoze is thoes patches and fixes. No number of patches fixes or anything can fix Windows.
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