To be Generative or Not to be Generative... That is the Question.

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group's Trends Report for the first half period of 2011, "Data-stealing and generic Trojan malware, typically designed to send information from the infected machine, control it, and open backdoors on it, reached an all-­time high, comprising almost half of all malware detected (2)."
Link: http://www.antiphishing.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_h1_2011.pdf

This chart below displays the statistics of said occurrences:


Due to the aforementioned, early proprietary network corporations such as CompuServe borrowed cybersecurity techniques (E.g: AT&T's Cap'n Crunch rule), to reconfigure their centralized network systems in order to dichotomize e-data (e-mail, downloaded programs, etc.) sent to customers, also known as "dumb terminals," and coding instructions sent to administrative programmers. However, this all changed with the Internet of the late 1980's.
From the first wave of the Internet worm in the late 80's to the lack of malicious experts and rise of unskillful users of the Internet in today's ultra postmodern 21st century, Zittrain makes the critically compelling argument that generative technology leaves a plethora of Internet end-point users open to significant and critical methods of "attacks from within." Now, while the thought of establishing and writing new codes for innovative and creative purposes may seem to have some intellectually sufficient insight behind it, the important matter at hand is that cyberworms, spyware, and viruses have radically contributed to the way in which the Internet and Cybersecurity systems are operated by their end-point terminals.

First and foremost, what I found highly interesting in this chapter was that Zittrain used the Morris worm as the foundation to drive his theory behind the vulnerability of generativity. According to Zittrain, even in the hands of highly trained administrators, these generative networked computers could be reprogrammed to still received and install uploaded codes from malicious hackers due to their generative capabilities of being consequentially more flexible and powerful in comparison to their "appliancized counterparts (38)." Well what does this mean for today's society who equip their PCs with anti-spyware and explore trustworthy sites? From a Zittrain-perspective, essentially those who try to partake in the "safe" method are still prone to even a front door attack (so to speak). Just because your PC is operated via faster network that is always connected to the Internet (with the high rise in Broadband users), does not justify the fact that a malicious software cannot attack your system's hardware and coding silently; some of those "safe" sites that your browse may as well be labeled as "sleeper" sites because they might already be infected but not yet malignant.

Using the theory behind Morris's worm (which was to target the network's computer endpoints), many other malicious attacks, such as the Michaelangelo Virus of 1992, the Melissa Virus of 1999, and the Blaster Worm of 2003 sought to use executable "renegade" codes to compromise the integrity of Internet end-points. Another interesting point that Zittrain further makes here is that "many administrators of these generative machines (of the 90's) were lazy about installing available fixes to known software vulnerabilities, and often utterly predictable in choosing passwords to protect entry to their computer accounts... and thus, there was no way to secure them all against attack (42)." This was possibly due to the fact that "few knew how to manage or coder their generative PCs, much less how to rigorously apply patches or observe good password security (43)."

In the, end generative technology has shown itself to be consistently beneficial with the innovations of the 21st century. Today, PCs operate with Microsoft Office, iTunes, Mozilla Firefox, and much more applications. However, no good dead goes unpunished, right? With the rise in malicious wide-spread attack through the Internet's centralized networks targeted at the network's endpoints, generative PCs have also engaged themselves in a dilemma, one which could eventually destroy the Internet as we know it... or save it (in some twisted, ultra postmodern way of expressing the First Amendment or via the exposing of backdoors in the network's system.)

Only time will tell....