Notes for our discussion of hacking, and "the Internet" vs. "the Darknet"

        Predictably, since I last revised this page in 2024, several new developments have increased and decreased the reliability of the Internet as a source of digital text.  In 2024, nine years after Timberg's 2015 expose of the Border Gateway Protocol's weaknesses, the U.S. government finally began urging technology companies to implement "public key" strategies to insure that the servers being sent your text (or the government's secrets) actually were legitimate and not misleading shells set up by criminals or spies.  If your curiousity leads you in that direction, you can probably still catch up with these events by reading "White House Unveils Road Map to Fix BGP," Dark Reading, September 4, 2024.

        Also, our knowledge of the history and sophistication of hacking has stolen a march on the course.  As of 2021, the go-to resource on the history and current state of "zero-day" hacking exploits is Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyber-Weapons Arms Race.  NY: Bloomsbury, 2020.  I ordered it as an ebook for the Goucher Library Main Collection.  In Chapter 13 ("Guns for Hire") of Part IV ("The Mercenaries") she describes "Pegasus" software sold by the NSO group to various national governments.  It allows any smart phone, including iPhones (!), to be turned into audio and video spying devices by remote operators, even when the phones are not turned on.  They advertised a "zero-click installation method" that did not require the phone's owner to do anything to enable the software to install itself, and it also was said to be "a 'ghost' that 'leaves no traces whatsoever'" on the infected phone (180-181).  Then, in the summer of 2021, several media outlets and Internet security companies broke stories about  thousands of  political activists and politicians whose phones had been hacked by Pegasus--Ghostbusters!: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/nso-spyware-pegasus-cellphones/  As of September 2024, when this page was last revised, Pegasus was still being used to spy on political opponents of repressive governments.  NSO had told Perlroth that the Israeli government supervised their sales and would not authorize the software for uses other than interdiction of terrorists, international drug dealers, child pornographers, etc.  However, as a security executive pointed out, "When you're selling AK-47s, you can't control how they'll be used once they leave the loading docks" (189).  If you want to resesarch the forces which hijack the "library" of the Internet and our personal "libraries" of information and experience, you might want to start with a chapter or two of Perlroth.  The story goes way back to the Cold War and the Soviet bugging of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow by inserting electronic coils in the embassy's IBM Selectric typewriters that would broadcast every keystroke outside the building to KGB transcribers ("Project Gunman," 69-77).  It had been going on for at least eight years by the time it was discovered in 1983 (77).  "Keystroke loggers" are still a common way hackers can steal your passwords, account names, and entire identity.  The following discussion derives more directly from Timberg's two articles and Darknet issues that have no necessary connection to state-sponsored hacking.

        Timberg's two articles, combined with a  scroll through Robert Zakon's Internet Timeline, should convince you that the Internet, the network upon which all of your digital devices increasingly depend for their access to digital text (and everything else!) is a patched-together mass of compromises and inventions rather than a single, coherently designed device.  The Internet's vulnerabilities to hacking are part of the way it grows new capacities, by permiting new code to "exploit" features or absences of features in old code.  Beneficial exploits are praised and make some people billionaires.  Malicious exploits are at least as numerous and can only be defended against with great difficulty.  One form of hacking danger from the Darknet is vulnerability of the Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS operating systems to "zero-day exploits."   For an explanation of the term and some examples from 2015, read:  http://www.pcworld.com/article/2982361/microsoft-patches-yet-another-hacking-team-zero-day-exploit.html The much more recent "ransomware" attacks in Spring 2016 are explained in this Wired.com article: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/hacker-lexicon-guide-ransomware-scary-hack-thats-rise/ 

        In the murky world of Internet security hacking, the terms "white-hat" and "black-hat" are used with some imprecision to identify legal, defensive hackers who help defend systems and users from those who use exactly the same computer skills to create software programs with which to penetrate system and user security for various purposes: to play, to make political statements, to damage or destroy a perceived enemy, or to make a lot of illegal money.    The "hats" can change colors swiftly.  For instance, a former hacker might start a "white-hat" Internet security company that offers, among other things, exclusive access to zero-day exploits so that their targets can write defensive "patch" code and distribute it before the exploits are announced.  That way, they can make money from the targets, and use it to buy the exploits from freelance hackers who may be playing both sides of the game.  Their terms of service could easily allow them to sell exploits to criminals as well as to legitimate software engineers trying to protect their employers and customers (i.e., you).

        In addition to zero-day exploits, which are mainly unintentional security openings in an operating system or application program, software manufacturers actually intentionally build security access "backdoors" into operating systems so that their field engineers can enter them if some failure of the system operator ("sysop") access has been disabled.  For instance, if you cannot log on to your Goucher account using the ordinary login screen, IT can always access your account through their "backdoor" system, though at Goucher they are supposed to ask your permission to do so.  If IT's access has been disabled by some coding disaster, perhaps as a result of a botched software upgrade, the software maker's own backdoor accesss remains to allow them to recover your data.  Nevertheless, if hackers discover the backdoor, they can use it, too, as in this November 2010 announcement of an Android phone backdoor exploit: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Back-door-exploit-for-Android-phones-1131858.html

Some early stages in Internet security--

Steve Crocker, RFC1 for Host Software, 1969.  The first Internet "Request for Comment"--note it has no section for "Security Concerns."

Jim Postel, RFC2000 for Internet Protocol Standards, 1997--the "Security Considerations" section has been added but is ignored.

Paul Nesser II, RFC2626 for The Internet and the Millenium Problem, 1999--identifying the "Millenium" or "Y2K Bug" and treating security rather more carefully.  The "Y2K Bug" convulsed the newly huge Internet community because so many programs were written with code that recorded the "year" in dates merely by the last two digits, i.e., 1999 was "99" and 1909 was "09."  What year do you think all those computer programs would think was referred to by people entering 2000 as "00"?  Yes, 1900.  BIG problems were anticipated, and some countries (i.e., the US) spent millions of dollars in preventative reprogramming.  Other than one Japanese nuclear reactor whose radiation detectors briefly malfunctioned until a back-up system restored them, no major catastrophies were reported.  Does this convince us that nothing can go wrong because of incorrect or badly designed basic programming assumptions?  Or does it convince us that we are living on borrowed time?  Your answer to this question, and your reasons for the answer, will be very interesting.  Could be a short paper?