Important note of Jul 10, 2021: this article was originally published in 2017. The grammatical errors are intentionally left unfixed, and the article itself is republished for historical reasons.
Unlike the state of the web at the time of dot-com bubble in the end of twentieth century, the Web of nowadays become more sophisticated. The internet of the past was a popular place, so the early internet-oriented companies thought that the internet itself was the source of profit, but it wasn’t. Of course, their marketing fail was caused by misunderstanding the meaning of the Internet.
The true source of profit was the convenient way of information sharing provided by the Internet, so the companies could implement the informational-sharing-oriented business models which were impossible in the past. For example, there’s impossible to advertise for the audience of 3.5 billions of people with traditional approach like paper mail letters, but Google can make it possible with their AdWords, online advertising service.
The internet of the past was popular, so the internet of today is a hive. Forbes says that the efficient use of the web as a place to make the business such as e-commerce or online advertising made the web giants the most valuable companies of the earth. For example, Apple is the number one of the list for today, and Apple is well known as the electronics manufacturer who doesn’t own a single electronic plant. The number two is Google, which also has zero manufacturing and prefer to make the business online.
So, the internet of today is a great marketing and business tool. Just like the biggest ones, the smaller startup companies are moving or even starting their business at the internet. Of course, the important business things such as personal data, banking accounts, commercial papers and billing information are moving to the web services. Their security flaws can cause that sensitive data to leak, because the hackers are interested in obtaining that kind of information, and it’s of great importance to protect it.
Such data leakages could have terrible consequences like the loss of profit or even a lawsuit. The network security specialists of the past has done a great job inventing the methods of safety data transfer. Even if the history of the information security begins a long time ago, in the antiquity, by the Julius Caesar method of message encryption, the lullaby of the IT security was the Enigma, a machine from the twentieths, which was able to encrypt and decrypt secret messages for military purposes. After the World War II, the Cold War started, bringing the new information security problems closely associated with international espionage.
The best of the best engineers and mathematicians worked together to create the unique ways to transfer data safely. Many years have passed from that days, but the brilliant security inventions of the past such as checksums, Mersenne twisters, cellular automata, hardware randomization machines, and the avalanche effect are still widely used in modern encryption algorithms. But, the main focus of the security research now is money transferring systems and storage engines, which are for the consumer purposes, but not the military.
But the web industry not always cared much about the security in the past. The main web security revolution had happened in 2005, when the aspiring young hacker Sami Kamkar found the way to hack MySpace, the most popular social network then. Sami created the self-replicating worm, which was stored at the user’s home page at MySpace and infectied the homepages of all its visitors. That virus did just one thing – it added Sami Kamkar to infected user’s friends list. The virus send one million friendship requests to Sami Kamkar from other people’s pages in just one day. Despite of Sami admitted and send the instructions how to disable the worm, the MySpace programmers just didn’t knew what to do. MySpace haven’t got IT security department that day. That accident attracted great attention to the problem of cybersecurity, and helped to involve the best programmers to find the way to make the web a safe place.
The main problems of the safest security systems of nowadays, the human factor ones, are still remains. Randall Munroe, ex NASA engineer, calls the password reuse the most actual security flaw of the internet in its entirety. For example, if you reused your PayPal credentials for sign up to john doe co, and that poorly protected company’s servers were infiltrated into, there would be no way to save your PayPal money, because hijackers could got your credentials which you reused. The password managing systems such as SSH storages are trying to solve the problem, but teaching people to use them is the matter of the future.
Thesis: the Web has serious influence on the modern business, thus, the Web security nowadays is as important as common information security in the past.
