When did the Internet become full of jerks and dickheads?

Time was when you could browse the Internet without having to worry about viruses, spam, hackers or my computer being turned into a zombie. The very first computer I had in my family (well, first PC) connected through a service called CompuServe, and we went online in 1994 without firewall or anti-virus. You didn’t need them unless you were actually downloading dodgy software. And on a 28.8 Kbaud modem, who was going to do that?

But these day spam has overtaken normal email traffic and continues to grow exponentially. It’s so bad that we call normal email traffic ‘non-spam’. Viruses are everywhere. And as soon as your PC goes online, it’s being hacked and pinged and god knows what else.

I’ve just had to reset my firewall’s settings manually to fix an error. As soon as I connected to the net, it was blocking hits from other PCs trying to ping it and intrusion attempts. Who are these people?

To illustrate how dangerous the Internet is for the unprepared, when I worked in Internet support of a large telecomms company, we once, as an experiment, put an unprotected PC on the Internet for the first time.

Within 13 seconds it was infected with the Sasser virus and had reset itself. And without maintennance, it continually shut itself down over and over again. the world record for Sasser infection is about 2 seconds.

And Sasser’s a relatively benign virus. All it does is force the PC to reset itself. In it’s original form, it doesn’t actually damage the PC or corrupt the data.

My question is: When did these bastards hijack the Internet? It’s supposed to be a great place, where people across the globe can communicate, share information, shop, play and connect to people. It still is, but these activities take place amidst a minefield of little gits trying to damage, hijack or destroy our computers, sell us Viagra and convince us that if we help them out of a jam and give them all our bank details, they’ll give us free money!

When the time comes for me to have children, I won’t get stressed about them being out at night, or where they are. I’ll already have had enough practice worrying about taking my computer online.