lobal security. But how serious is hacking? In 1989, the Computer Emergency Response Team, a nonprofit organization that monitors security issues throughout America from its base at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported 132 computer intrusions. Last year they recorded 2341! And in recent months, a few celebrated cases have shed a new light on the hacker's netherworldly activities. One notorious hacker is American Kevin Mitnick, a 31-year-old computer junkie arrested by the FBI in February for allegedly pilfering more than $1 million worth of data and 20.000 credit-card numbers through the Internet. Still, the new wave of network hacking is presenting fresh problems for companies, universities and law-enforcement officials in every industrial country. In July, John Deutch, head of the CIA, told Congress that he ranked information warfare as the second most serious threat to the national security, just below weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands. The Internet suffers around a million successful penetrations every year while the Pentagon headquarters of the US military has 250.000 attempts to hack into computers. But what can be done for hacking? There are ways for corporations to safeguard against hackers and the demand for safety has led to a boom industry in data security. Security measures range from user Ids and passwords to thumbprint, voiceprint or retinal scan technologies. Another approach is public key encryption, used in software packages such as Entrust. An information system girded with firewalls and gates, broken vertically into compartments and horizontally by access privileges, where suspicion is the norm and nothing can be trusted, will probably reduce the risk of information warfare as we know it today to negligible levels. Yet, increasingly intrusive and somehow antithetical to the purposes for which science in general is purposed. It is no accident that the World Wide Web was invented to enable ...
