New Book: Creeping Failure: How We Broke the Internet and What We Can Do to Fix It

Published on August 18, 2010 | Views (1378)

From the book's cover:

The Internet is often called a superhighway, but it may be more analogous to a city: an immense tangle of streets, highways, and interchanges, lined with homes and businesses, playgrounds and theatres. We may not physically live in this city, but most of us spend a lot of time there, and even pay rent and fees to hold property in it.

But the Internet is not a city of the 21st century. Jeffrey Hunker, an internationally known expert in cyber-security and counter-terrorism policy, argues that the Internet of today is, in many ways, equivalent to the burgeoning cities of the early Industrial Revolution: teeming with energy but also with new and previously unimagined dangers, and lacking the technical and political infrastructures to deal with these problems. In a world where change of our own making has led to unexpected consequences, why have we failed, at our own peril, to address these consequences?

Drawing on his own experience as a top expert in information security, Hunker sets out to answer this critical question in Creeping Failure. Hunker takes a close look a the "creeping failures" that have kept us in a state of cyber insecurity: how and why they happened, and most crucially, how they can be fixed. And he arrives at some stunning conclusions about the dramatic measures that we will need to accomplish this.

This groundbreaking book is an essential first step towards understanding the Internet in a larger context as we try to build a safer Internet "city." But it also raises issues that are relevant far outside the online realm: for example, how can we work together to create not just new policy, but new kinds of policy? Creeping Failure calls for nothing less than a basic rethinking of the Internet -- and of how we can solve problems together.

McClelland.com | Books | Creeping Failure by Jeffrey Hunker

2 Comments

A very insightful approach to a critically important issue for business and commerce today. The city metaphor is right on the mark and will lead to the proper solutions which must be "community" based.

Posted by Michael M September 01, 2010, 10:17

An entertaining and lucid account of the threats facing the internet today, and intriguing and revolutionary proposals for solutions from cyber-security expert Jeffrey Hunker, formerly Senior Director for Critical Infrastructure Protection and of the staff of the National Security Council. From the very first page, Creeping Failure: How We Broke the Internet and What We Can Do to Fix It, draws its readers into the world of cyber security and by analogy and example reveals the complexities of the challenges facing internet security without resorting to technical jargon and gobbledegook. The intricacies of worms, viruses, bots, distributed denial of service attacks, spam, phishing, targeted penetrations and insider threats are all described for the lay reader as well as cyber threats as they relate to national security (espionage, war and terror). Hunker illustrates how cyber security is an issue for everyone, whether they are connected to the internet or not and asks his readers to consider what the appropriate roles for government and the private sector should be in devising a solution. Finally, he asks, if we were to create a new internet what should it look like and what would it cost? Creeping Failure is a must read for anyone interested in current affairs and the internet because in describing the challenges facing the cyber world it also describes the challenges and trade-offs we all face in contemporary society.

Posted by Interested reader September 08, 2010, 16:40

Who am I?

Author, consultant and researcher, and an interesting guy who does work mostly in cyber security, information policy and management, and national security issues. My career experience includes management consulting (Boston Consulting Group), Wall Street investment banker (Kidder Peabody), The White House (National Security Council Senior Director) and academia (Carnegie Mellon dean and professor).

Creeping Failure