Jeffrey Hunker
Principal, Jeffrey Hunker Associates, Pittsburgh, PA

Author of  Creeping Failure: How We Broke the Internet and What We Can Do to Fix It

Technology Tuesdays
January 11, 2011

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 experience as a top expert in information security, Hunker sets out to answer this critical question in Creeping Failure. Hunker takes a close look at 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.