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Internet Security Essay

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Security on the Internet

How do you secure something that is changing faster than you can fix it? The Internet has had security problems since its earliest days as a pure research project. Today, after several years and orders of magnitude of growth, is still has security problems. It is being used for a purpose for which it was never intended: commerce. It is somewhat ironic that the early Internet was design as a prototype for a high-availability command and control network that could resist outages resulting from enemy actions, yet it cannot resist college undergraduates. The problem is that the attackers are on, and make up apart of, the network they are attacking. Designing a system that is capable of resisting attack from within, …show more content…

People use interactive Web pages to obtain stock quotes, receive tax information from the Internal Revenue Service, make appointments with a hairdresser, consult a pregnancy planner to determine ovulation dates, conduct election polls, register for a conference, search for old friends, and the list goes on. It is only natural that the Web's functionality, popularity, and ubiquity have made it the seemingly ideal platform for conducting electronic commerce. People can now go online to buy CDs, clothing, concert tickets, and stocks. Several companies, such Digicash, Cybercash, and First Virtual, have sprung up to provide mechanisms for conducting business on the Web. The savings in cost and the convenience of shopping via the Web are incalculable. Whereas most successful computer systems result from careful, methodical planning, followed by hard work, the Web took on a life of its own from the very beginning. The introduction of a common protocol and a friendly graphical user interface was all that was needed to ignite the Internet explosion. The Web's virtues are extolled without end, but its rapid growth and universal adoption have not been without cost. In particular, security was added as an afterthought.

New capabilities were added ad hoc to satisfy the growing demand for features without carefully considering the impact on security. As general-purpose scripts were introduced on

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