27 September 2007

The Dark Web

Antique Toshiba Laptop, circa 2005

I had to fire up the old Toshiba computer the other day. Pain in the butt. My scanner does not work with the Mac Operating System, and it was the only way to get pictures uploaded to the hard drive and send them off my folks.

It made me a little queasy, thinking the box had been dormant for nearly a year. The firewall and virus protection was way out of date, so the first thing I had to do was disable the wireless connection. God only knows what would flow in the back of it, maybe turning it into some zombie 'Bot, sending out spam e-mails at the command of some unknown hacker on the other side of the world. It is a scary web, if you do not stay on top of things, and the Toshiba was virtually unprotected. It could become an active threat right here in the house, betraying key-strokes and passwords and anything else an enterprising cracker could make it report.

It is one of those hugely unintended consequences that a project chartered by the Department of Defense should become the command and control mechanism of the Jihadis. They use it effectively as a recruiting tool, propaganda broadcasting megaphone, and collaborative planning tool.

The net is a virtual university, too, with plans and techniques for making improvised bombs.

You would think there would be something we could do about it, and there is. When I was in the business, the DoD folks I dealt with were convinced that they could send a gazillion volts down the network and fry the bad guys at their keyboards. It was a comforting idea, but egrettably, that does not quite work, and the scope of the web's nooks and crannies makes it challenging to identify what people are up to out in the wide cyber-world.

The National Science Foundation and other federal agencies have chartered a project they call “Dark Web,” in which university researchers are funded to collect terrorist associated web content. All of it.

The whole thing is mind-boggling. I have heard that there are programs that aim to capture and archive snap-shots of the entire scope of activity flying around the digital world.

Everything your write, every website you visit is all there, tucked away for further analysis.

This is all a good thing, I suppose. The scientists are using spiders to wander out there and find associations. There is software- I used to sell some of it- that uses public records to associate individuals. Shared phone numbers, addresses, post office boxes. The Gaming Industry funded some of the research, and you can imagine who else purchased it. Link and content analysis devised to detect plagiarism on college papers can be used to identify anonymous authors with relative confidence, and sophisticated search techniques can find messages embedded in pictures, a technique called “steganography.”

Some of the pictures are of the kind that are illegal to own, and thus the search for the bad guys on the Dark Web is an ambiguous game. The entire twisted human psyche is out there on display, and even though the process is automated to the highest degree, someone has to look at the items of interest.

The press reports that there are more than 5,000 sites operated by known international terrorist groups, including all the bad guys you can think of and some that you can't, not in your wildest dreams. Some of them are franchise outfits and others are poseurs and wannebees from all across the world.

The smarter ones can hide behind multiple languages and are buried in virtual private sites. The really smart ones have booby-trapped their sites so that the 'bots sent out to find their content take nasty viruses back to the labs.

It is all in a day's work out there, but when you think that we have all assumed second and third lives on the Web, it does give one pause. Everything is out there, and everything is being captured for further analysis.

As soon as I got the old pictures scanned and uploaded to the old computer, I reluctantly enabled the wireless link and logged on to my secure server. I made them an attachment to an e-mail and sent them to myself at the other computer about six inches away. In so doing, I gave them to the Web, dark and light versions, and went on about my affairs.

There is a definite upside to all this. You don't really have to worry about backing up your data. Someone is doing it for you.

The only problem is trying to find out who you are supposed to ask to get it back.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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