Proper Citation:
Dr. Hwa A. Lim, "The Internet - Human-computer symbiosis", Symbiosis, May 2005, pp. 22-25.

Malwar - Human- Computer Symbiosis

The Internet ?Human-Computer Symbiosis

By

Dr. Hwa A. Lim, Ph.D., MBA

Chairperson & CEO, D’Trends, Inc., Silicon Valley, California, USA

hal@dtrends.com

 

₪ “Thank you for your e-mail.?This Internet of yours is a wonderful invention??George W. Bush, email to Al Gore, mocking his famous Internet claim, Newsweek, March 2000. ₪

The Beginning Of The Internet

Many technologies have been developed in the past forty years.? Acres of paper and oceans of ink have been expended on specific aspects of the developments, and each account varies slightly from the other.?I will adopt a tangential approach in this article.

In the summer of 1960, Joseph C.R. Licklider (1915?990), an experimental psychologist at MIT, published a 7-page seminal paper entitled “Man-computer symbiosis?in a rather obscure journal IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE(1), pp. 4-11.?A declarative statement in the paper was breathtaking in its implications, “The hope is that in not too many years, human brains and computer machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.?#060;span style="mso-spacerun: yes">? This scholarly paper would become one of the most influential works of the twentieth century ?it provides the intellectual framework that led ultimately to the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

In October 1962, two years after this visionary paper, Licklider was hired as director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of a new agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).?ARPA is now renamed DARPA where the “D?stands for “Defense??His mandate was to find a way to realize his networking vision and interconnect the DoD’s main computers at the Pentagon.? He assumed that key position at a critical moment in the Cold War (1945?991) when the U.S. was pouring billions of dollars into countering the perceived threat of attack by Soviet satellite-guided missiles within its borders.

He envisioned what he called an Intergalactic Computer Network ?a globally connected net through which everyone could quickly access computer data and programs from any site in the world.?The Pentagon was interested in part because it needed a communications system able to withstand nuclear attacks.?A decentralized computer network would satisfy this requirement.? Scientists were also intrigued by the idea of making telecommunications systems more efficient by breaking apart messages into “packets?of information that could be routed through different paths around the nation and reassembled by computers at the destination.

In April 1968, Licklider, in collaboration with a fellow computer pioneer Robert Taylor, published another prophetic paper, “The computer as a communication device?in Science and Technology.?The opening statement was “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.?#060;span style="mso-spacerun: yes">? Also interspersed in the paper were sentences like ?the programmed digital computer can change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than did the printing press and the picture tube? and new terms like “interactive network? “online communities?and the new network will be operated by trained people sitting before “monitors?with a “terminal keyboard? using “electronic pointer controllers called ‘mice??#060;span style="mso-spacerun: yes">?They will “log in? enter their password, and begin communicating.

This article appeared at a time when the U.S. was in turmoil, divided by the war in Vietnam and social unrests.?Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis, less than five years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, intensified conspiracy theories.?Five months later, Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President Kennedy, was also murdered in a Los Angeles hotel.?Amidst all the political and social unrests, the fruits of the ARPA effort led to the formal birth of the ARPANET a year and a half later.?On Labor Day weekend of August 30, 1969, in Room 3400, Boelter Hall of the Science Building at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Leonard Kleinrock, graduate students, government and corporate engineers performed a successful test run by transmitting bits of information from a huge steel machine (an interface message processor) to a host computer twenty feet away.?Two months later on October 29, at about 10:30pm, the real test began ?to see if they could send data from their computer to one at the Stanford Research Laboratory (SRL).?In LA, they established a telephone connection with their Stanford colleagues, over three hundred miles to the north.?They tried typing in “login?on their screen to see if it also appeared on the Stanford monitor.?The system crashed after the “g?had been typed.?Yet the revolution had begun.?It was a brief but historic moment that deserves a place alongside Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first words spoken over the telephone in 1876, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,?and alongside Wilbur Wright in 1903 watching the frail plane carrying his brother Orville lift into the skies from the sands at Kitty Hawk and fly for forty-nine seconds at a speed of thirty miles an hour.

A second attempt on that historic day was a success.?So, the ARPANET, that U.S. military network disguised to provide networking capabilities with a high redundancy, came into being thirty-five years ago as the predecessor to the Internet.? The principle behind has remained unchanged and has proven very powerful: to have every computer potentially talk to each other, regardless of what platform, what network path the communication actually takes.?In 1972, the first electronic mail occurred and the rest is history.

The Digital Divide

Licklider was a realist.?His great hope was that online network would expand education and knowledge for all the people, but he did warn in 1968, “For society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will ‘to be online?be a privilege or a right??#060;span style="mso-spacerun: yes">?If only a favored segment of the population got a chance to benefit from the new network, he feared the unequal access would further widen the dangerous division that already afflicted the American society.?Those connected to the network would prosper greatly, while those not connected would fall further behind.?This is what has happened.?It is called the “digital divide?

From the U.S. ?a nation of statistics ?the following numbers provide a telling sign of a digital divide.?Official studies show the already great gap between Americans with high incomes and higher education and those with lower income and lower education is widening.?Individuals with college degrees are eight times more likely to own a computer and sixteen times more likely to have Internet access than those with only elementary school education.?Families with parents attending some college are at least three times more likely to have Internet access than those with parents who have only high school diplomas.?A child in a low-income Caucasian family is three times more likely to have Internet access than a child in a comparable African American family, and four times more likely than a child in a comparable Hispanic family.?These dismal official findings mirror those of university and corporate studies of public usage of the computer and the Internet: Americans at the bottom, already the most likely to fail, are becoming more disconnected from the society.? Their worsening situation brings with it all the social dynamite.

Similar situations are probably unfolding in emerging nations, and will likely be the case as well in developing nations as they get connected.

The Mighty Electron

While new inventions and innovations can produce satisfaction and pleasures in many areas of life, they can also bring new frustrations and problems.? For the Internet, for example, a deluge of information, both wanted and unwanted, may prove overwhelming in a time when the average American office worker sends or receives, on average more than 200 messages a day, and spam and junk clutter the screen.?The electronic invasion of privacy, whether licit or illicit, exceeds anything known before.?The number of diginoyers (derived from annoy, similar to telenoyers ?telephone privacy invaders) seems to increase by the day.

Being online also means being potentially vulnerable to computer plagues, including viruses and worms, and other pranks and predations of hackers.? The preeminent weapon of most of the twentieth century was the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb.?Atomic bombs were used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima during the Second World War; the hydrogen bomb has never been used.?As mighty as the hydrogen bomb may be, in the Internet age, it has now been displaced by the awesome capability of a single mighty electron ?the electron that surges in a computer to perform all the functions of this ubiquitous device!?There is no guarantee that the hydrogen bomb will never be used, but the electron is now a weapon more easily accessible.?It is truly mightier than a gun!

In certain sense, the situation is exacerbated by the democratization of hacking.?Residing on the Internet are more than 30,000 hacker-oriented sites.?As police and cyber security experts around the world are cracking down cyber crimes, computer plague writers have become more cautious and crafty.?Most elite writers no longer spread their work at all; instead, they “publish?their codes on websites, often with detailed descriptions of how the plague programs work.?These tools and programs for hacking can be downloaded, and with a click of the mouse or a tap on the keyboard, the virus, worm or whatever can be sent over the Internet to cause havoc.?The number of computers connected to the Internet has been rising rapidly over the decades: 213 in 1981, 376,000 in 1991, and 110,000,000 in 2001.?Since 1981, the number of computers connected to the Internet approximately doubles every year.?Consequences of any nefarious attempts to wreak havoc on the Internet can be considerable.

As expected, the temptation to release published plagues is overwhelming.?The people who release the plagues are often anonymous mischief-makers, or script kiddies.? “Script kiddies?is a derisive term for those aspiring young hackers ? teenagers or curious college students ?who do not yet have the skill to program computers.?They download the plagues, sometimes slightly altering to claim they have written the codes themselves, and then re-release in an attempt to assume the role of a fearsome digital menace.?Script kiddies, as stipulated in the derisive term, often have only a dim idea of how the codes work and may therefore have little concern for how a digital plague can rage out of control.

For now, computer plague epidemics are born of the symbiotic relationship between the people smart enough to write computer codes and the people dumb or malicious enough to spread the plagues.?Among the possible offensive weapons of script kiddies are:

q       A computer virus is a code that copies itself into a larger program, modifying that program in the process.?When it arrives on a computer, it disguises itself, such as “luv_ya?instead of “luv_ya.exe??It is actually an executable code which cannot kick start itself; a user needs to be fooled into clicking it into execution.

q       A worm is a program that reproduces by copying itself.?Unlike a virus, it usually does not modify other programs and does not need any user intervention to spread.?Its purpose is to self-replicate ad infinitum, thus eating up a system’s resources.?Its menace is its speed.

q       A Trojan horse is a code fragment that hides inside a program and performs a disguised function.

q       A logic bomb is a type of Trojan horse, used to release a virus, a worm or some other system attack.?Upon receiving a particular signal, it would wake up and begin to attack the host system.

q       A back door or trap door is a mechanism that is built into a system by its designer to give the designer a way to sneak back into the system.

and

q       Chipping is a plan to slip booby-trapped computer chips into critical systems.?This was originally proposed by the U.S. CIA.

As noted, many of these weapons are malicious software, which in the hacker community is shortened to malware: a malware is a tiny program that exists solely to self-replicate, infecting computers hooked up to the Internet.? Malware can be designed to cause damage to infected computers, but that is not always the case.?Different malware can also be combined to increase their threats.?For example, a worm may carry a virus with it, dropping it onto the victim’s hard drive to do its work before mailing itself off to a new target.?With this change in the repertoire of weapons, drastic changes in response are necessary.?For example, the primary targets of intelligence and counterintelligence services in cyber terrorism will change; the tradecraft used by these services will change; and the roles of friends and foes will continue to blur.?The fictional James Bond 007 is now obsolete, and it is now cyber cops against script kiddies.?The war now is no longer a conventional war, nor is it a nuclear war, but it is a malwar ?a war against malicious software or malware.

Origin Of Computer Virus

One of the first computer viruses can be traced to Bulgaria, in 1989.?By the end of that year one of them, Dark Avenger, had spread with enough ferocity to catch media attention.? In creating menaces, Dark Avenger attached itself to MS-DOS .com and .exe files and in the process added 1,800 bytes of code to the infected files.?Every sixteenth time the infected program was run, it would randomly overwrite part of the hard disk and on the computer screen the phrase “Eddie Lives... somewhere in time? followed by gibberish, would appear.?Embedded in the code was “This program was written in the city of Sofia ?1988?9 Dark Avenger??The computer, infected and self-destructing, would eventually crash.? Some part of the operating system would be missing, smothered under Dark Avenger’s relentless output.

Dark Avenger was an example.?Many other viruses spread, most of the time even without the affected knowing about them.?Personal computers had been in use, and programs passed along in schools, universities, research centers, offices and homes, transferred from one diskette to the next or from one electronic mail to another they carried the infection along.? By 1991, an international epidemic was evident.?One hundred and sixty documented Bulgarian viruses existed in the wild, and an estimated 10% of all infections in the U.S. came from Bulgaria, most commonly from the Dark Avenger.?Early in the year, 9% of federal agencies and companies in North America had experienced computer virus outbreaks.?By the end of the year, the number infected had risen to 63%.

The Bulgarian virus factory started in the 1980s during the presidency of Todor Zhivkov (1911?989).?Zhivkov decided to make Bulgaria a high-tech power, using computers to manage the economy and concentrating industry on hardware manufacturing.?He envisioned Bulgaria would eventually function as the hardware manufacturing nerve for Comecon, the now-defunct Eastern Europe’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.?In this role, Bulgaria would trade its computers for cheap raw materials from the Soviet Union and basic imports from the other Eastern Bloc countries.

In the 1980s-Bulgaria, the prevailing environment was very promising because Bulgaria had many well-educated young electronics engineers.? In the second half of the 1980s, clones of IBM and Apple computers appeared.?However, the Bulgarian archaic infrastructure and ill-managed economy were recipes for failure.?Compounded to the problem was the absence of particularly useful applications for the hardware.?While factories continued to manufacture clone PCs, they did not have any software to make the machines function.?To pirate programs and operating systems from the West, the Bulgarians had to crack copy-protection schemes that stood in the way, and in so doing, they became better and better at hacking.

On record, the first Bulgarian virus infected the West in 1989.? It started as harmless as the Yankee Doodle to the more destructive Eddie to the deadly Nomenklatura.?The latter attacked the British House of Commons library, rendering valuable information irrecoverable.?At its peak, 1990?991, both the alarm and the reality of the Bulgarian blight spread exponentially, from computer to computer and instilling fear from mind to mind.?By 1993, the Bulgarian menace subsided and Bulgaria was no longer a significant source of new viruses.?Today, Bulgaria exists as a kind of cybernetic bogeyman, the birthplace of viruses.

WWW ?World Wide Weapon

Newer threats have become more sophisticated, more damaging and the forms have also increased, from viruses to worms to others, and they attack computers in other ways, including web pages.?A handful of these viruses and worms have transformed the way people experience computers.?Their attacks, and break-ins have become a way of life for Internet sites.? According to the CERT Coordination Center of Carnegie Mellon University, the number of assaults was 6 in 1988, 132 in 1989, 252 in 1990, 2,412 in 1995, 21,756 in 2000, and 137,529 in 2003?#060;/span>

The attacks by the Nimda or W32/Nimda worm in 2001 demonstrate the Internet and Web vulnerability.?In wreaking havoc, the worm normally modified Web documents, which are files with .htm, .html, and .asp extensions, and certain executable files found on the infected systems.?The Nimda worm then duplicated itself under various file names, scanned the network for vulnerable computers and propagated through email.?In so doing, it increased network traffic, thereby causing some sites to experience denial of service or degraded performance.

One of Nimda’s features is to attack computers that have been compromised by the Code Red worm and left in a vulnerable state.?It also targets home users?computers, which are among the most vulnerable.?The Code Red worm exploits the Internet Information Server (IIS), which is a Web server.?The Melissa virus spreads by means of users?email on desktop computers.?The Nimda worm merges the damaging features of both Code Red and Melissa, and more.?In this sense, Nimda is the first significant worm that attacks computers that act as servers and those that are desktop computers.

Computer experts called 2003 “The Year of the Worm.?#060;span style="mso-spacerun: yes">?In January, the Slammer worm infected some 75,000 servers in 10 minutes, clogging Bank of America’s ATM network and causing sporadic flight delays.?In the summer, the Blaster worm spread by exploiting a flaw in the Microsoft Windows operating system: it carried taunting messages directed at the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, infected hundreds of thousands of computers and tried to use them to inundate a Microsoft website with data.

In August, the Sobig.F worm exploded with even more force, spreading via electronic mail messages by using addresses it had swiped from infected computers.?At its height, one out of every 17 electronic mail was a copy of Sobig.F!? There are two features that make Sobig worm a particularly infamous worm: 1) it used multithreading, a technique that made the infected computer execute several commands at once; 2) it was released six separate times throughout 2003, and each time the worm was programmed to shut itself off permanently after a few days or weeks.? When the worm appeared anew (Sobig.A, ? Sobig.F), it had been altered as if the author was performing a controlled experiment to observe its behavior in the wild, then killing off the creation to prepare a new and more insidious version.?By the time the latest variant, Sobig.F, appeared in August of 2003, the worm was programmed to install a backdoor that would allow the author to assume control of the infected computer.?To date, the author of Sobig worm is still a mystery.

In late January of 2004, Mydoom.A electronic mail spread even faster than Sobig.F.?At its peak, one out of every 5 electronic mail was a copy of Mydoom.A!?The payload was also nastier: it reprogrammed infected computers to attack the Website of SCO from February 1st through 12th.?SCO Group had incurred the wrath of the Linux community for its claims that important pieces of the open-source Linux operating system are covered by SCO’s Unix copyrights.?A variant of the worm, Mydoom.B attacked Microsoft’s website.?However, the impact was not as great as the deluge on SCO’s website.

The era of the stealth worm has begun.?A stealth worm is a piece of malware that is not destructive or is designed not to cripple the Internet with too much traffic.?Quite the contrary, a stealth malware is designed to be unobtrusive, to be able to slip into the background to secretly harvest data, hence “stealth.?#060;span style="mso-spacerun: yes">?Comparing this with a few years ago when the Chernobyl virus, timed to hit on the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl Explosion (April 26, 1999), was the biggest threat for it deleted infected computer’s hard drive, we see how far computer plague evolution has come.?The prevalence of destructive plagues has steadily declined to almost zero.? The new brand of malware authors seems to have learned a real life lesson from biologists: the best way for a computer plague, like a biological plague, to spread is to ensure its host remains alive!

The evolution continues.?Experts are now predicting the rise of cryptovirus, metamorphic worm, cellular phone virus, and the list continues.?A cryptovirus is a malware that invades a computer and encrypts all the files on the computer, rendering them unreadable until a ransom is paid for the files?decryption; a metamorphic worm is a malware that shifts its shape so radically that anti-virus companies cannot recognize it is a malware; a cellular phone virus is one that can place a call to a toll number and stick the cellular phone owner with charges that the malware author would collect, or it can drown the 911 service with phantom calls.?Indeed, in June 2004, the first cellular phone malware called the Cabir worm infected cellular phones using the Symbian operating system, and spread itself from phone to phone by means of the blue-tooth wireless technology.? Blue-tooth is a short-range wireless networking technology included on many cellular phones, hand-held organizers and laptop computers.?The worm does not seem to do anything destructive, although it can drain the batteries of infected cellular phones quickly.

The computer plague evolution has already begun, but the war on computer plagues and cyber terrorism ?malwar ?is just beginning.

The Politics Of The Internet

In the 1980s, Albert Gore was among the few leaders who foresaw the tremendous potential of the ARPANET.?As a congressman and later senator, Gore fought tirelessly for the funding that would turn ARPANET into what is now the Internet.?In a 1999 interview, Gore told Wolf Blitzer of CNN News, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.?#060;/span>

This statement would become a big hit, enjoying a great deal of media coverage all the way to the 2000 U.S. presidential election.?The quote following the title of this article contains a misleading message that Albert Gore, 2000 U.S. presidential candidate, had claimed to be the inventor of the Internet.?The origin of the phrase “invented the Internet?can be traced to first appear in a Republican Party press release, which was picked up by other press to repeat countless times.?What should have been an enormous credit to the man’s vision had been distorted by his political opponents to become a symbol of his insidious, compulsive dishonesty.?Ironically, Gore was also criticized via the Internet itself!?This character issue, as we know it now, was one of the reasons why Gore lost the election fraught with manipulations.?The Internet, as we learn from the U.S. presidential election, can also be a president-maker without the use of any computers, without firing a bit or a byte.

Neither was J.C.R Licklider the inventor of the Internet.? He is one of the most influential figures in the history of computer science.?He laid the intellectual framework for decades of research, and as director of IPTO, he put in place the funding priorities that would lead to the Internet.?This is how Licklider will be remembered.?As for Albert Gore, among the many things he will be remembered by, he is a president that the U.S. never had.

But as the 2000 U.S. presidential election shows, the Internet has become a very important tool of information and unfortunately, also of misinformation.? In 2000, the Internet was a buzzword.? Any mention of the word in any report or article would almost certainly assure high hits for the report or article.? Similarly, in 2004, the word “terrorism?in any report or article will almost certainly guarantee high hits or access to the report or article.

The 1924 U.S. presidential election was the first that relied on the radio; the 1952 presidential election was the first that made full use of the television; the 2000 presidential election exploited the Internet; and now in the 2004 presidential election, Web loggers or bloggers, who do their running commentaries and political or criminal justice issues without venturing from their desks, have become a fruitful alternative to television networks.?Most bloggers build their followings by ferreting out interesting but obscure information (and unfortunately, misinformation too) or by providing commentaries (and unfortunately, misleading or outright distorted commentaries as well) on events and news coverage of those events.?Some way along the way, just before the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections, a group of people have “perfected?the art of denial, and political campaign smearing of his political opponents.

Just as information (and unfortunately, misinformation) dissemination medium has evolved over the years, so has the art of negative political campaigning.?Contemporary political consultants argue that every political campaign seems to begin with the promise of an uplifting, mutually respectful debate of the issues, only to devolve into character attacks and distortions because negative ads work.?As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania stressed, “There appears to be something hard-wired into humans that gives special attention to negative information.?I think it is evolutionary biology.?It was the wariness of our ancestors that made them more likely to see the predators and hence to prepare.? The one who was cautious about strange new food probably did not eat it.?They sat back and watched other people die.?There’s reason to be hesitate about that which is vaguely menacing.?#060;/span>

 

I hope this article will not make uncomfortable reading.?My intent is to bring to the readers increased and ongoing awareness and understanding of cyber-security issues, vulnerabilities and information dissemination.? Like other technological advances which are beneficial to humankind, there are always people on the fringe who will exploit and abuse the breakthroughs.?If the benefits far outweigh the nuisances, the technological advances will survive as useful tools.?As for the Internet, it has brought a lot of benefits.?Otherwise it would not have survived as a useful technological tool.?It is now up to the Internet users to exhibit good netiquette.?Otherwise we, as users of the Internet as a whole, will have disappointed the visionaries who foresaw the potential and importance of the Internet and the inventor(s) of the Internet.?It is also up to us, as a society, to be able to discern noises from facts, information from misinformation, contained in Internet messages, mail, blogs?#060;/span>

About The Author


Hwa A. Lim, aka Hal.

Dr. Hwa A. Lim obtained his Ph.D. (science), M.A. (science), and MBA (strategy and business laws) from United States, his B.Sc. (Honours) and ARCS from Imperial College of Sc. Tech. & Medicine, the University of London, United Kingdom.?He is a Kingstone Best-Seller author, author of fourteen titles in English, and a regular contributor to Symbiosis.?Hal, Chairperson and CEO of D’Trends Inc., resides in Silicon Valley, California, USA.?He is reachable at hal_lim@mindspring.com, http://hal_lim.home.mindspring.com/.

This article is based on Hal’s experience when he was program director at a supercomputer institute (1987?995), from various parts of his book, Hwa A. Lim, CHANGE: in business, corporate governance, education, scandals, technology, and warfare, (EN Publishing Inc., Santa Clara, California, 2003); a book by Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times, (Harcourt, Inc., New York, 2001); and an article by Clive Thompson, “The virus underground? New York Times, February 8, 2004.

For more information on Hal’s books, please access http://www.dtrends.com/HAL.html and click on “books?