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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 2000 Being online exposes us to the workings of the devious WHEN I received an e-mail from some unknown female declaring that she loved me I was immediately suspicious - at my age, it is a natural reaction. And I was even more careful when the message suggested that I should open the attachment which contained more details. I didn't, I just deleted it, and all the subsequent copies that arrived very shortly afterwards. But thousands of people didn't delete and within hours we had a planet-wide problem costing billions of pounds. As I use a non-standard operating system, I need not have worried because my machines were immune, but it always pays to be cautious. In any case, I could have easily become a carrier in this deadly game of e-mail virology. The media were quickly reporting the outbreak, and anticipating a global meltdown within hours of the early reports. Reporters expressed disbelief at the speed with which the virus had spread across the planet. It seems most vulnerable machines were engulfed within six to eight hours after the initial e-mail was launched. How can this be, and how can it happen so fast? Well, suppose for a moment you have a mere 30 people in your address book. An incoming virus either latches onto every outgoing e-mail, or initiates new e-mails to all the people you know. So the mathematics goes like this. On the first click, 30 new people are hit. On the second click it has reached 900. On the third click, 27,000, the fourth sees 810,000, and by the fifth click 24.3m. And so by just 6 clicks we can infect 729m machines which is far more than the total number on the planet to date. But if there are a modest 300 e-mail contacts in an address book, the progression is far faster. It now goes: 300 to 90,000 to 27m and then 8.1 billion - more than the population of the planet in only four clicks. Many people have more than 1,000 contacts, and they can cover the globe in a mere three clicks. Of course, this assumes we start from a single point with all the machines on the planet switched on, and all have similar sized address books, operating systems and applications. The practicality is far more complex. Not all machines are left running online all of the time, and address books are never the same size or simply linear. There are multiple copies and loops, as we all appear on many machines, and, in effect, get our own e-mail virus back again from multiple replies. Still, we should not be surprised at the speed and effectiveness of any e-mail propagated infection. It only takes three to six clicks to ring the planet. The path of the sun and our waking and working hours had more to do with the speed and impact of the Love Bug than any other mechanism. If we were awake and our machines were on-line, we were at great risk. Fortunately some 15pc or so of the planet have opted out of the standard PC operating system and remain immune to most of these attacks. What is really amazing is the lack of sophistication of the bug producers and the gullibility of the victims. In the next phase, perpetuators may become far more devious. And when the majority leave machines permanently online, the potential threat explodes. We don't have a lot of time to build suitable defences. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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