Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition

Preface

The World Wide Web has changed our world. More than half the people in the United States now use the Web on a regular basis. We use it to read today’s news, to check tomorrow’s weather, and to search for events that have happened in the distant past. And increasingly, the Web is the focus of the 21st century economy. Whether it’s the purchase of a $50 radio or the consummation of a $5 million business-to-business transaction, the Web is where the action is.

But the Web is not without its risks. Hand-in-hand with stories of the Internet’s gold rush are constant reminders that the 21st century Internet has all the safety and security of the U.S. Wild West of the 1860s. Consider:

• In February 2000, web sites belonging to Yahoo, Buy.com, Amazon.com, CNN, E*Trade, and others were shut down for hours, the result of a massive coordinated attack launched simultaneously from thousands of different computers. Although most of the sites were back up within hours, the attacks were quite costly. Yahoo, for instance, claimed to have lost more than a million dollars per minute in advertising revenue during the attack.

• In December 1999, an attacker identifying himself as a 19-year-old Russian named “Maxim” broke into the CDUniverse web store operated by eUniverse Inc. and copied more than 300,000 credit card numbers. Maxim then sent a fax to eUniverse threatening to post the stolen credit cards on the Internet if the store didn’t pay him $100,000.^[1] On December 25, when the company refused ...