Sunday, August 13, 2000
It's time to get serious about battling viruses
Sensible, safe solutions abound
By Ross D. Pollack
Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal
Bad as it was, the I LOVE YOU.vbs virus could have been a great deal worse.
Such a successful penetration agent — CBS Radio reported that it has been estimated that 45 million personal computers worldwide were infected — could have done even more devastating things.
No less an expert than James A. Cannavino, chief executive officer of Issaquah, Wash.-based CyberSafe, provider of computer security, said the “love bug” virus was still in the category of vandalism. But others have put a price tag of billions of dollars on that hooliganism.
Mr. Cannavino, a longtime IBM executive and strategist, widely viewed as the father of the ThinkPad, thinks it wise not to be too specific about how more potent viruses could be home-brewed. But he said an entirely different approach to fighting them is overdue.
“We have to get past the complexities of certification and so on,” he said. “It has to be simplified.”
He estimated that 25 percent of the world's corporate computers were well-protected, another 25 percent moderately protected, and the remaining 50 percent open to whatever hackers throw at them.
“The technology exists today to make cyberspace completely safe,” he said. It is the habits and practices of humans that have to change, or be circumvented in the name of security.
Mr. Cannavino said that even a system that offered foolproof virus identification would be no real protection. “Some people opened the virus, knowing it was a virus. They were just curious what it would do.”
He mentioned making return Internet Protocol addresses available to security people as one way to begin to shut down the vandalism. Denying that information in the name of privacy simply allows the vandals to persist, he said.
“Imagine that someone has stolen your car,” he analogized, “and is using it to mow down little kids across town. Do you insist that nobody should invade your privacy in order to catch the culprit and put him out of action?”
But Mr. Cannavino offered a technology-based solution, one that is not dependent on transferring and updating virus files for comparison with unknown intruders.
He would reduce computer access to sealed cards that could be computer-read but not decoded, and these cards would control a person's activities online. With the right card you could use a computer system; without it you couldn't.
The cards would make it possible to determine who introduced what into cyberspace, a powerful deterrent to hackers and crackers.
It sounds as if Mr. Cannavino is on to something. And in addition to its technical merit, which will no doubt be explored elsewhere, it seems an intelligent cry for law and order in what has been the cyberspace equivalent of the Wild West.
When asked if he were suggesting that people were demanding “rights” and “freedoms” in the computer realm they wouldn't think reasonable in real life, he smiled back in a way that suggested — politely — “Isn't that obvious?”
The recent virus outbreak should make it clear to even the least technical mind that the status quo must change if Internet-based small businesses and even casual e-mail are going to have a chance. Some surrender of anonymity and irresponsibility (they're not the same thing) is going to happen, whether by national law or international treaty.
But if the father of the freedom-fostering ThinkPad is involved, civil liberties types can have some hope that the solution will be fair, technically elegant and the least intrusive necessary to get the job done.
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