Scenario One After The Storm, Reform

In 2010, information security will be much better than it is today. But between then and now, everything will get inconceivably worse.

There’s no need to imagine a worst-case scenario for Internet security in the year 2010. The worst-case scenario is unfolding right now.

Based on conservative projections, we’ll discover about 100,000 new software vulnerabilities in 2010 alone, or one new bug every five minutes of every hour of every day. The number of security incidents worldwide will swell to about 400,000 a year, or 8,000 per workweek.

Windows will approach 100 million lines of code, and the average PC, while it may cost $99, will contain nearly 200 million lines of code. And within that code, 2 million bugs.

By 2010, we’ll have added another half-a-billion users to the Internet. A few of them will be bad guys, and they’ll be able to pick and choose which of those 2 million bugs they feel like exploiting.

In other words, today’s sloppiness will become tomorrow’s chaos.

The good news is that we probably won’t get to that point. Most experts are optimistic about the future security of the Internet and software. Between now and 2010, they say, vulnerabilities will flatten or decline, and so will security breaches. They believe software applications will get simpler and smaller, or at least they won’t bloat the way they do now. And they think experience will provide a better handle on keeping the growing number of bad guys out of our collective business. Some even suggest that by 2010, a software Martin Luther will appear to nail 95 Theses?perhaps in the form of a class-action lawsuit?to a door in Redmond, kicking off a full-blown security reformation.

The bad news is that this confidence, this notion of an industrywide smartening up, is based on the assumption that there will be a security incident of such mind-boggling scope and profoundly disturbing consequence?the so-call digital Pearl Harbor?that conducting business as usual will become inconceivable.


The Digital Pearl Harbor: What It’s Not
The phrase digital Pearl Harbor was first seen in print in 1991. D. James Bidzos, then president of RSA, said the government’s digital signature standard provided "no assurance that foreign governments cannot break the system, running the risk of a digital Pearl Harbor."

By 1998, the term’s use was reasonably common, a dark, lowering cloud on the horizon of the Internet revolution. Newsweek, in an article from that year, suggested it would come in the form of a "sophisticated attack on our digital workings [which] could create widespread misery: everything from power failures to train wrecks."