It’s time to hit restart on the internet

Microwaves, light bulbs, baby clothes, yoga mats — four mundane objects that seem immune to advanced technological developments but in reality have actually already been compromised by the rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT).

The IoT hopes to include  all of our objects, even the most trivial ones. For example, if a toothbrush became a fragment of the IoT, this toothbrush would be able to send and receive data on its usage and draw patterns from our habits and improve them.

More importantly, whoever has access to this toothbrush data would also have access to the user’s brushing habits.

The capabilities of the IoT are the stuff of fantasy such as being able to control a house’s entire light schematic or receive real-time updates on a baby’s sleeping routines with the touch of a button on our phone. However, these possibilities are very real and open each of these “mundane objects” up to the danger of hackers, who can now take advantage of the faultiness of our Internet’s foundation.

Because of the expanding IoT and the vulnerability of our current Internet, we need to invest effort in rebuilding it.

The problem with the internet is that it is old. When the World Wide Web became publicly available in 1991, its creators and moderators didn’t need to worry about increasingly sophisticated hackers, state-run or independent, and other dangers to information that are all too common these days. As a result, the internet lacks the foundational structure to protect our privacy, resulting in countless data breaches and other flaws in security.

What’s worse is that the internet has now become an integral part in our everyday lives. Sure, we’re basically psychologically dependant on our phones, but the more immediate problem is that our phones store all our private information, from passwords to Social Security numbers, on an internet-run system. As the rest of our appliances are sucked into the IoT, we face possible attacks on all fronts.

In late October, hackers completely overwhelmed Dyn, a company that hosts domain name servers and allows websites to be accessible. This enormous breach caused most websites that relied on Dyn to go down, including Twitter, Spotify, Paypal and Netflix.

To cause this attack, hackers flooded enormous amounts of faulty information to the Dyn servers. Just like a teacher would be unable to move the curriculum forward if students began a flood of non-stop questions, the servers were unable to perform their actual jobs due to the heap of random information.

The worst part? These hackers did not simply take advantage of virus-infected computers, as they usually do. They instead used 550,000 of our IoT-connected microwaves, light bulbs, baby clothes, yoga mats and other objects, according to The Daily Beast. So basically, your IoT-reliant yoga mat may have helped take down Netflix.

According to the Garter research group, there will be nearly 6 billion IoT devices by the end of 2016 — that’s 6 billion objects in our homes that hackers will soon be able to use to shut down parts of the Internet. If 550,000 devices could take down Twitter, Spotify, Paypal, Netflix and more, imagine what 6 billion non-secure devices could do.

This breach is just one of many that are bound to occur if we do not rebuild the internet and fix its flaws. Hacks could be much worse — individuals could gain access to our IoT-reliant security systems and even unlock our front doors.

Because of the vulnerability of our Internet and the problems that it can cause in our day-to-day lives, it is important that we begin taking steps toward rebuilding the Internet and filling in the holes that currently exist.

Rebuilding the internet may seem completely unrealistic and superfluous, but in today’s technology-absorbed society, this idea is not only practical but also urgently needed.

BBC has admitted that the “Internet is broken,” The Atlantic has stated that “it’s not too late to rebuild this [internet] for the people” and the New York Times has also begun exploring the idea of restarting it from scratch. It’s clear that the notion of remaking the internet is neither impractical nor unheard of.

According to The Atlantic, rebuilding the internet does not necessarily require human development or an “administrative entity to arrange the topology of this [new] network or how the people are connected. It is entirely up to the people participating and the software that runs this network to make everything work.”

The new internet should instead be reliant on a “mesh network,” which has proven to be more effective than our current Internet. This mesh network would connect computers and devices directly and wirelessly to each other without a main, center system and thus results in automatic self-adjustments under different circumstances. Essentially, it fortifies itself during disaster.

In Brooklyn, a mesh network demonstrated its potential when it survived during Hurricane Sandy. The regular internet there, on the other hand, quickly went down.

Because of the immense risks that our current internet poses, it is important that we begin taking steps toward revitalizing the internet. Until then, our yoga mats will continue help taking down Netflix, and our lives will grow ever more vulnerable to being manipulated by hackers.