Purdue Professor Among Experts
Seeking Sabotage Solution
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Gene Spafford, a professor of computer sciences at Purdue University, was among approximately 20 computer specialists invited to a White House gathering last month with President Clinton and his National Security Council advisers to discuss ways to prevent hackers from disrupting Internet services.
The hastily arranged meeting came a week after computer hackers paralyzed Yahoo!, Buy.com, eBay, ETrade and other prominent Internet sites for hours at a time by overloading them with fake traffic.
Spafford says there's no easy way to prevent Internet hacking.
"I think the government wants to know what can be done in the near-term to shore up public confidence and address some of the problems," he said before leaving for Washington. "There won't be solutions coming out of this, just a sense of direction."
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart says that Clinton was joined at the meeting by U.S. Sec. of Commerce William Daley, Chief of Staff John Podesta, the executives of several computer technology companies and academics.
Spafford is director of Purdue's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance, which is exploring many of the computer security and cyberspace issues addressed at the White House. He says the rapid growth of e-commerce applications has exposed numerous weaknesses with the Internet that weren't envisioned when it was created.
"I think one of the big problems is that people are expecting more out of it than it can give. It was never designed to handle this many users and the sort of denial of service problems we're seeing," he says.
Spafford says most computer software wasn't designed with security in mind. Instead, he says, they were designed for simplicity and the ability to quickly add new features. And, he worries that computerized business and healthcare records, law enforcement and even national defense are at risk of being disrupted by hackers.
Spafford believes that one way to safeguard those areas would be to create entirely new software — a task that would take years and cost billions of dollars: "There's no simple answer. If there was a simple answer, we would have come up with it a long time ago."