Page 39 - Cyber Defense eMagazine forJune 2021

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A Digital Journey: A Long and Winding Road

How did we build the internet and not secure it?

By David Jemmett, CEO and Founder, Cerberus Sentinel

Many people are under the impression that the internet is essentially safe and secure. We use the internet
daily for email, shopping, and social interaction. We depend on it for such essentials as our medical
records, finances, homes, cars, schools, and power grid. All are reliant on the endless interconnected
computer networks that we call the internet. The internet is an existential mass network that touches
every aspect of our lives. The truth is that the internet is not secure, not even close. The reasons for this
are multi-faceted, complex, and yet in some ways very simple to understand.

We built it open

The Advanced Research Projects Agency network (ARPANET), under the auspices of the U.S.
Department of Defense, was originally designed as a military network to interconnect missile silos with
enormous redundancy. Initially ARPANET was created in 1969 for only military use. It was expensive to
operate, so it was distributed to universities that worked on government projects. Ultimately, it was
transitioned to what we now call the commercial internet.
This was unlike the network in China, which was initially built to contain all data by going through the
government portal then distributed throughout the country to their population. The Chinese served as
the data gate and guardians. The U.S. network was rolled out all over the world and was built to be an
open and redundant architecture for anyone to communicate. It grew fast and changed the world.

The internet also was built with the altruistic purpose to share information and open borders around the
world. It was meant to connect people and information digitally, the way a nation’s highways, toll roads
and streets connect us physically. In fact, in the mid-1990s, it was known as the "information
superhighway."

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