(February 10) – “So how could the Internet, which many claim was originally designed to withstand a nuclear attack, be seemingly brought to its knees by low-level hackers using techniques and software downloadable from the Net itself?” writes Don Tapscott in today’s Financial Post.
“More directly, if you are an executive planning to move your bricks and mortar company on to the Web, should this make you reassess your plans?
“To answer the second question first, no, you should not delay re-inventing your company around the Web. The attacks on Yahoo, eBay, E*Trade, ZDNet, Amazon and others are, in the big picture, relatively minor incidents.”
According to Tapscott, what did not happen was as important as what did. “The security of these sites was not compromised and confidential customer information, corporate data and similar material was not retrieved by the attackers. The only damage done was that customers of these companies could not access the Web sites . . .
“Of course, if you were an E*Trade customer, the potential for damage was substantial, since you were unable to execute trades via the Web for 90 minutes. But for other sites, such as Amazon, the impact was not much more than a nuisance. Customers could buy their books or CDs a few hours later.”
Keep the impact in perspective, Tapscott suggests. “Public infrastructure is always vulnerable. When car-driving protesters in Miami cause massive traffic jams by lining up side by side and driving below the speed limit, it didn’t mean highways suddenly became less reliable.”