On March 31, keep an eye on your computer

Alas, Chicken Little may be right. A group calling itself Anonymous has posted its intention to shut down the Internet on March 31. A statement said it would be a “protest against Wall Street, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs…” It went on to say, “Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the Internet…”

Small comfort, eh?

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give credence to such a threat. However, I heard a lecture this week that made me focus not just on this particular warning, but on the very real dangers of cyber-warfare, cyber-espionage and cyber-theft. The speaker was John S. Serafini, director of a private company involved in developing businesses dedicated to improving Internet security. He’s a kind of cyberspace venture capitalist, and he knows his stuff. His head may be in the i-clouds but his feet are here on Earth, where he hopes to make money and make private, business and military enterprises safer.

A graduate of West Point, Harvard Business School and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Serafini works between and among Washington, D.C., Abu Dhabi and Boston. He doesn’t dismiss the March 31 threat outright, but he says that if it happens, it would be a temporary shutdown until the experts could figure out a way around the problem.

During his talk, he enumerated various incidents of cyber-hacking. The intrigue, audacity and brilliance of the attacks make the subject both fascinating and frightening.

Nobody is officially taking credit, but it is widely believed that Israel and the U.S. were behind the so-called Stuxnet computer worm that infected and destroyed much of Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure, setting back the development of nuclear weapons in that country, perhaps by years. Stuxnet does little harm to computers that don’t meet specific configurations. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit … It was a marksman’s job,” said Ralph Langner, owner of a computer security company in Germany, in a New York Times article.