Computer viruses and spam e-mail may cause the internet to collapse in the near future, a Finnish researcher warned on Monday.
Based on current trends, the internet would collapse in 2006, Hannu Kari, professor at the Helsinki University of Technology, told the Finnish news agency STT.
Problems facing the internet were not only linked to technology, he said.
”There are many bad people who want to create chaos on purpose,” said Kari, who has in the past voiced doubts about the internet’s future.
Kari said spam and viruses were the main culprits. The next stage was that the loosely orgnised global network would function less and less smoothly, and become more and more prone to manipulation.
The end result would be that the volume of spam in the network passed the pain limit and undermined the credibility of information gathered from the internet.
Other threats to the internet included security holes able to be used by a person, regardless of location. Skilled users could also gain control over thousands of computers and use them to launch attacks.
In order to salvage the internet, Kari said more pro-active measures were needed. Infrastructure and software needed to be improved to prevent the effects of attacks. There was also a need to improve user identifcation.
”Currently there are no guarantees that a named sender is the real sender of an e-mail,” Kari said. – Sapa-DPA