Introduction
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Unfortunately, there is no such thing as absolute security on the Internet. It’s literally impossible to eliminate the risks of fraud, identity theft, espionage, or malicious attack. But if you think about, that’s no different than the real world. We make security tradeoffs all the time, finding acceptable levels for risks like privacy loss or theft. The dangers on the Internet are really no different than those in the real world. However, according to Schneier’s The Invisible Battleground (2009), there are differences, and they trip us up again and again. We understand how the real world works, so we try to apply that understanding to the Internet. In the real world, we want to prevent copyright infringement, so we try to make bits so they can't be copied. We want to know where data comes from, so we try to enforce attribution. Schneier says our problem is that “we think we can design computer voting machines because we know how mechanical voting machines work. We build electronic banking systems that mimic the brick-and- mortar bank branches they've replaced, and social networking sites that try to capture all the richness of human interaction. But these things don't work as we envision, because the world of bits is unlike the world of atoms - and the same rules don't apply. This isn't to say that Internet security is impossible, only that we tend to go about it all wrong. But as more and more of our critical infrastructure moves to the Internet, we need to start getting it right” (Schneier, 2009, p.14). And even though these risks aren’t completely unavoidable, it makes sense that many companies are dedicated to fighting these online threats. People want to be able to browse the internet, free from fear of losing all of their documents because of one wrong click on a fake advertisement.