The Internet was brought to its knees two decades ago with a simple software program designed by a Cornell University graduate student. The program skipped from computer to computer at a blinding speed and thoroughly clogged the then tiny network in the space of just a few hours.

The program was just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net, but it started a revolution among cyber-terrorist that has become a nightmare for security experts today. Needless to say, since that simple program was initiated things have gotten a lot worse. It is a growing belief among some engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have gotten so crazily elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

It is widely debated what a new Internet should look like, but one alternative is a type of “gated community” that would require users to give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. This is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users.

As a new and secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet could end up as the “bad neighborhood” of cyberspace. It would ultimately become a place where you would enter at your own risk and have to keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

The problem has grown to the point to where if we are not willing to rethink today’s internet, then we are just setting ourselves up for a series of public disasters. Last year that point was driven home when a criminal gang in Eastern Europe unleashed a malicious software program that easily sidestepped the worlds best cyber defenses. The malicious software known as Conficker, quickly infected more than twelve million computers. The program infected everything from the computer system at a surgical ward in England to the computer systems of the French military.

The Conficker program demonstrated just how vulnerable our Internet system is to a concerted attack. Despite a thriving global computer security industry that is projected to reach $79 billion in revenues next year, and the fact that that in 2002 Microsoft itself began an intense corporate effort to improve the security of its own software, Internet security has continued to deteriorate globally. In fact, many computer security researchers say the nearly two decades of efforts to patch the existing system have been a vain attempt to hold back the millions of new threats that are developing daily.

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