If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable

The Good and the Bad of the Internet

We are living in an age of technological revolutions. The world is changing faster than ever. The Internet has shaped the world permanently, removing many geographical barriers, benefiting us massively, but presenting entirely new types of risks.

Prehistoric Internet

What is the Internet? It is the network of networks. It is a network built to survive nuclear war. It is a network that is older than most of us—and one that will be here after we are gone.

The history of the Internet began in the 1960s, when the U.S. defense administration started designing a new type of information network called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). Internet users may still encounter the name ARPANET. When searching for the sources of net addresses, you will occasionally see “in-addr.arpa” or “ip6.arpa.” This refers to the original network where it all started.

The first router was connected in August 1969. Being the only device on the network, it was unable to send data anywhere. The first data packet was transmitted on October 29, 1969, when researchers from the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford University tested a new connection for the first time.

The initial data transfer protocols were slow and error-prone, problems that were solved by the development of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and Ethernet in 1973. These networking standards formed the basis of the Internet. TCP/IP ensured ...