The Internet is a constantly hostile environment, we need firewalls, anti virus, anti spyware and security updates.

With the internet expanding contributed to technological advancement and popularity, business and government sectors are taking advantage of the conveniences it provides, this has brought along with it serious vulnerabilities.

These were outlined in a letter to President George W. Bush sent by a group of concerned scientists:

“The critical infrastructure of the United States, including electrical power, finance, telecommunications, health care, transportation, water, defense and the Internet, is highly vulnerable to cyber attack. Fast and resolute mitigating action is needed to avoid national disaster.”

27 February 2002

Some notable attacks:

Moonlight Maze - A highly secretive event accidentally discovered by U.S. officials, unauthorized probing of computer systems at the Pentagon, NASA, Energy Department, private universities and research labs.
Ongoing for nearly 2 years since 1998 raiding through tens of thousands of files including maps of military installations, troop configurations and military hardware designs.

This was traced back to Russia but it could be a front where the true attacker is somewhere else in the world.

Code Red - A multi variant worm first appeared July 2001, affecting 300,000 computers in the U.S. its MO would be denial of service attacks, ping attacks and websites were shut down replaced with a message “Hacked by Chinese.”.

Nimda - A highly sophisticated, high speed malicious worm that badly affected the financial sector, mass mailing and explioted holes in Microsoft software.
Infecting email programs, servers, web pages. and millions of computers.

Slammer - Another worm attacking on 25 Jan 2003 0530 GMT exploiting servers running Microsoft SQL 2000 software, regarded as the fastest attack in history making the most damage in the first ten minutes of it’s release.

Documentaries to watch:

“Cyber War!” by Frontline

“To Catch a Little Fish” - Discovery Channel