Creeping Failure - 9780771041488

As more and more of our daily interactions have shifted online, our lives have become more comfortable - and, in many ways, more vulnerable. The persistent insecurity of Internet activity, from spam to identity theft, affects all of us every day. And if these problems are left unchecked, their financial and emotional costs will build up to the point that we begin to turn away from this vibrant and essential tool. In Creeping Failure, world cyber security expert Jeffrey Hunker gives us a brief history of the Internet, explains the growth of the compelling challenges facing the Internet as we know it today, and offers a groundbreaking, controversial solution to our collective dilemma. Smart, provocative, and timely, this book is essential for every computer user.

The Internet is often called a superhighway, but it is closer to a city: an immense tangle of streets and highways, homes and business, playgrounds and theatres. We may not physically live in this city, but most of us spend a lot of time there.

But the Internet is not a city of the 21st century, argues Jeffrey Hunker, an internationally known cyber security expert. The Internet of today is equivalent to the burgeoning cities of the early Industrial Revolution: teeming with energy but also with new and previously unimagined dangers, and lacking the technical and political infrastructures to deal with them. The Internet was never designed with all of today's uses in mind - and now the cracks are spreading.

In Creeping Failure, Jeffrey Hunker takes a close look at this critical problem, exploring our current state of cyber insecurity: how and why it happened, and most crucially, how it can be fixed. And he arrives at some stunning conclusions about the dramatic measures that we will need to accomplish this.

This groundbreaking book is an essential first step toward building a safer Internet, while also raising issues that are relevant far outside the online realm. Creeping Failure calls for nothing less than a basic rethinking of the Internet.