(Newswire.net — May 31, 2015) — When designers of the first building blocks of the Internet were thinking about the protection, they didn’t consider the Internet user to be the threat, as that would have been analogous to sawing the branch one is sitting on. Their focus was on how without focusing on why someone might execute a cyberattack, The Washington Post reported.
The MIT scientist and one of the Internet designers David D. Clark told the Washington Post he thought he had fixed a bug that was found in the 80’s computer network. He said at first he was surprised to see the bug was still there, before realizing it wasn’t a bug, but the very first internet-circulated virus, planted in the network by one of the network users.
The virus was a small piece of software that made copies of itself and had spread to other computers, causing them to crash simply by bottlenecking the communications. It spread through the network thanks to its speed, connectivity and availability, the holy trinity that the Internet was based on. But who would have thought users would attack one another, Clark said in The Washington Post article.
“It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” Clark recalled. “We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.”
They were wrong. What began as an online community of a few dozen researches, now connects more than 3 billion people, Washington Post reported.
“We didn’t focus on how you could wreck this system intentionally,” said Vinton G. Cerf, Google vice president, who in the 1970s and ’80s designed key building blocks of the Internet. “You could argue with hindsight that we should have, but getting this thing to work at all was non-trivial.”
According to Cerf, the Internet pioneer, now a Google executive, he wishes that he and fellow computer scientist Robert E. Kahn had been able to build encryption into TCP/IP from the beginning.
“I wished then, and I certainly continue to wish now, that we could have done a better job,” said Steve Crocker, the chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit group that oversees the designation of Web addresses worldwide.
“We could have done more, and most of what we did was in response to issues as opposed to in anticipation of issues,” Crocker referred to the Internet designing issues.
Twenty years later, in 2008, Clark crafted a new list of priorities for a National Science Foundation project on building a better Internet. The first item was, simply, “Security.”