Internet security is "a lie"

By Christopher Null

All your online bill paying and money transfers are exposing you to a serious risk of fraud and other online maladies - far worse than you've ever imagined and getting worse every day.

Specifically, incidents of online fraud have increased four-fold in the last six months, according to Financial Times cyber security reporter who's sounding the alarm about the safety of the money we make accessible via the web.

Writer Joseph Menn is calling for a mass overhaul of web security, a "Manhattan Project" that will turn an inherently insecure technology - the web - into one designed with protection in mind. And that may not even be possible on our current infrastructure. "Anything financial, anything commercial, anything government needs to be on a different network," he says. "We can keep our current computers and chips, but we need different protocols, different ways for computers to talk to each other that do not rely on openness and trust."

According to Menn, electronic fraud is hardly the stuff of petty criminals but rather the purview of major international crime rings, predominantly operating out of Russia and China. Today such crime is a $1 trillion industry, and our government has been largely powerless to stop it.

Menn is calling for better coordination between the FBI and CIA and the law enforcement groups of other countries in order to stop the growth of cyber crime, but ultimately we need a real technological solution to the issue, not so much a regulatory one.