Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
Would you be comfortable living in a
house that someone else had the key to?
What if an underground tunnel led into
it from a public park where its windows
could never quite close all the way?
Would you trust it with your safety and
your
privacy? The internet is that house.
This is not to say never go into the
house, but rather you should know the
hazards before you store all of your
valuables there and do what you can to
protect
them. So, why is it insecure and why
can't we just fortify it until it's
safe? Well, first of all, the internet
was not originally built to be what it
is today. It's like someone decided to
expand a shoe box into a skyscraper.
The internet originally developed when
computers were huge and so expensive to
own that only universities, big
businesses, and a few governments had
them. The point originally was to let
these massive supercomputers talk to
each
other. And as soon as two computers
could send information back and forth,
we had a network. The network gradually
grew until personal computers emerged in
the 1980s. And then it
exploded. Soon, people were not just
talking to each other, but also
exchanging money, playing games, reading
news, shopping, and doing everything we
associate with the internet today. Other
devices started talking to the network,
too. Phones and cars and refrigerators
and elevators and power plants and much,
much more. But the ease of all those
devices talking to each other came at a
price. Security. One computer could send
another instructions to delete
everything on it or take it over. We
call these viruses and malware. or one
person could steal another's identity by
guessing, cracking, or extracting a
password. Vulnerabilities such as these
will never completely go away because
they're built into the internet's very
architecture. Criminals use them to
steal billions of dollars, governments
use them for surveillance, and activists
use them to further their political
goals. Between 2004 and 2013, over 1
billion records of personal information
were stolen or leaked through data
breaches of major organizations.
As a thought experiment, let's imagine
what a perfectly secure internet might
look like. Users would not be allowed to
download or install anything onto their
computers. All internet traffic would be
monitored and regulated by bots and
humans, massively limiting the number of
websites you could visit. In order to
log onto a website, you'd have to type
in a 100 character password, submit a
genetic sample, and whistle a tune.
The servers that hold data would be kept
in heavily armed
fortresses on the moon. And even with
all these safeguards in place, some
clever hacker would almost certainly
still find a way
in. The good news is, even with our
flawed internet, there are simple things
you can do to protect yourself. And
there are a lot of people committed to
making the internet more secure.
In Nova's cyber security lab, you'll
play as one of these people, protecting
a company that's the target of
increasingly sophisticated cyber
attacks. You must continuously
strengthen your defenses to thwart these
attackers. You'll do this by completing
challenges that will give you basic
coding abilities, help you spot scams
designed to trick you into giving up
your secrets, and teach you how
passwords are cracked and
strengthened. The house that is the
internet may be built on a shaky
foundation, but it's been a home to
innovation and an unprecedented free
exchange of ideas.
It's up to us to make it liveable in
spite of its flaws.