The internet is broken – and we can no longer do without it

‘The internet is broken,’ a corporate chieftain told me last week. It was an arresting remark, but he did not mean that his home Wi-Fi hub had gone down and required a jab with a paperclip, as mine frequently does. He meant that the entire web has become so insecure — so plagued by industrial-scale scammers, viral anarchists and, according to the US Department of Justice, Chinese military hackers — that it can no longer be trusted for any form of confidential data transmission, from online payments to state secrets.

By way of confirmation, as I type, in comes an email with a toxic fake ‘invoice’ attached. Among the last few days’ worth of deleted items, I can see half a dozen well-crafted attempts at data theft or worse, including ‘Click here’ messages purporting to be from BT, Santander and Paypal, and a ‘Thought you might be interested in this’ link from a hacked lady member of the House of Lords.

Perhaps one of them contained a ‘ransom-ware trojan’ called CryptoLocker that aims to encrypt my files then demand payment to decrypt them again; or Gameover Zeus — ‘the most sophisticated virus ever… used to steal millions of dollars around the world,’ according to a recent report. At the personal level, only multiple passwords and constant vigilance offer any hope of day-to-day protection; one peril is fake emails offering to cure viruses but actually inserting new ones.

At the government and big-company level, many billions will have to be invested to conserve the integrity of systems that are now too interwoven and too dependent on speed to revert to safer, slower channels. In the ruling fever for web-based solutions, it turns out we have consigned much of our commercial and administrative life to a technology most users barely understand, and with no conception of the risks it carries.