Tel Aviv----May 30...... Chances are your computer is now being read by a stranger. Monitored by hundreds of Internet companies which have created spyware to track your every movement on the Internet so that they can gain intelligence on consumer behavior. But there are other spies out there too.

Top executives of Israel's leading companies including Cellcom, Yes, Pelephone, Meir Motors, Tami-4, Ace Hardware, Volvo Israel and Amdocs have either been arrested or have been placed under suspicion in the last few days for corporate espionage. This also includes several private detective companies run and operated by former IDF officers.

Are you writing an e-mail? Opening a Word file? Speaking on a cellular telephone? If you haven't got it by today, now's a good time to begin to internalize: There's a pretty good chance that the e-mail, the file or a transcript of your call will find their way to your competitor. Business people abroad realized a long time ago that every e-mail they write could end up in their competitors' hands or, at worst, in the hands of the law enforcement authorities, and could be used against them in a court of law.

As one who created Israel's first commercial Website back in 1995 - NetKing, has worked as an Internet consultant to both governmental and commercial organizations in the field of Internet marketing, SEO - search engine optimization, Internet security and as an editor of the Jerusalem Post Internet news Web site and the Israel News Agency, I am not surprised.

Israel boasts one of the world's largest user populations of Internet, some 50 percent of all Israelis are on-line. But their awareness regarding their own security on line fails the test in with the lowest grade. Many of us who have worked with governmental and corporate computer security know that you never have your internal network connected to the Internet. Never! You have different computers in different rooms. You just don't mix milk with orange juice. But for some of Israel largest companies, they are now finding out the hard way. Executives arrested, information stolen. We have all been hurt in this scandal of spyware called Trojan Horses, programs placed on your computer by strangers using e-mail which has evaded your Norton, AVG, Mcafee, Avast and StopSign anti virus programs.

Some business managers in the United States customarily say that each decision they make has to pass "The New York Times test": Would you make the decision if you knew it would be published tomorrow on the front page of The New York Times? Now, business managers in Israel will have to consider the Trojan horse test every time they turn on their computers, and assume that every file or document that comes up on the screen at home or at the office could find its way to enemies and rivals.

This morning and over the coming days, all the newspapers in Israel will be filled with frightening stories about the computerized world and the age in which we live - about Big Brother who knows all there is to know about us, about Trojan horses that infiltrate our lives and about the huge investments organizations will now be forced to make in data-security systems. But before we begin the intimidation campaign, let's remember how we got here in the first place: We became accustomed to the infinite flow of free information on the Internet; we got used to knowing everything - quickly and free of charge; we got used to 24 hours a day of news, information, movies and entertainment from around the world for free - in every home and every office.

We became accustomed to high-speed, efficient and simple communication by means of e-mails, SMS services, forums, talk-backs, cellular calls, instant messaging; we got used to video, audio and text wherever we may be, at any time. And after all this, we are kicking up a fuss and are astounded when it turns out that there is another side to the coin, that someone can relatively easily slip a Trojan horse into our computers.

The affair was uncovered in November 2004, when author-consultant and former capital market player Amnon Jackont was shocked to discover that details from a book he was writing had appeared on a website, without him disclosing the material to anyone. Together with his wife, Varda Raziel-Jackont, a marriage counselor, Jackont filed a complaint with the police.

The police opened an investigation, eventually code-named "Horse Races", and took Jackont's home computer for testing. The investigation found that a Trojan Horse virus had been uploaded into the computer, which was sending documents and pictures to FTP file-storage servers in Israel and overseas. The virus was highly sophisticated, enabling remote control of Jackont's computer. The police investigation discovered that the virus had been uploaded via e-mail. The police fraud squad computer unit used technological aids to find the source of the virus, Michael Haephrati, 41, a former high-tech expert and resident of Bat Yam, who currently splits his time between the UK and Germany.

Haephrati was arrested in London last week. The police were not surprised to discover that Haephrati was involved, as he is the ex-husband of Raziel-Jackont's daughter. The Israeli investigators, in cooperation with Interpol, the London Metropolitan Police, and the German Police, found dozens of FTP servers in Israel and overseas, including the US. Haephrati is suspected of transferring stolen material from other computers to these FTP servers. The police realized the extent of the affair when they examined some of the files. Tailor-made Trojan Horse It is suspected that the Trojan Horse virus was uploaded into the computers of many commercial companies via e-mail or CD, sent as business proposals to the recipients. Merely inserting the CD into a computer was enough to upload the virus without the user's knowledge. The police say that this kind of CD had been found at many companies.

Israel police said yesterday that as investigators examine more of the material, they are amazed at the huge amount of documents illicitly copied from a variety of companies. According to fraud squad Captain Arie Edelman, "This is the beginning of the inquiry and in the coming days more companies will be investigated." Edelman also said, "The way it looks right now, at the end of this affair, no one will be saying the mountain turned out to be a mouse. This looks like an affair with evidence carved in stone." The police said it is possible that many infiltrations of Israeli companies won't be discovered during the investigation. Testimony from arrested private investigators indicates the Internet spy software was placed at dozens of companies, but names were not provided.

The victims have responded.

PR man Rani Rahav said, "If it was up to me, the guilty would hang." Partner stated in response, "We are shocked by the findings that are being released. "We are sure that the Israel Police is making every effort to discover the entities that acted to obtain the information, and will uncover the truth." Strauss-Elite stated, "We are examining the ramifications for us, as much as possible. We thank the Israel Police for discovering this affair. At this stage, matters speak for themselves, and we would prefer not to respond any further." HOT stated, "We are shocked by the investigation's findings, as reported by the media, and are studying the details. We expect competition between companies to be fierce and aggressive, but it should be conducted according to a code of ethics, and by law, just as HOT has done in the past, and will continue to do." Ad man Rami Shalmor said, "It is disgraceful that company executives, instead of creating real competition, take short-cuts and give in to temptation, buying commercial material so as to win the market. This is a norm that has got to stop. Competition should be fair."

Ad man Udi Pridan said, "At this stage, we are learning, together with the police, what materials were stolen, and will act accordingly." Globes editor-in-chief Haggai Golan said, "Obtaining confidential information from the newspaper's computers does serious harm, particularly to the newspaper's freedom of expression, and its obligation to provide reliable information to its customers. We hope that this was an isolated incident."

The first response to such revelations is a deep fear. In a country in which there is a national ethos of military secrets and everyone is aggressively competing against everyone else, the notion that a rival is embedded in one's computer or server is a horrific one. Now, one can also explain that this is further evidence of the process of the corruption of norms in Israel and the violation of copyrights and intellectual property rights, and we are left with a particularly dark scenario.

But there is also a half-full glass: When both junior and senior managers in an organization know of the risk, they will be extra careful not to do anything illegal. It is worth noting the types of organizations in which the Trojan horses were found. None of them is an organization that has real secrets; none of them is a high-tech company from which patents, codes, chemical formulas, software or sophisticated algorithms were stolen. They are all commercial companies and 90 percent of their "secrets" become public knowledge within days, weeks or months in any event. If such companies were to invest less energy in "secrets" and "surprises" that their competitors were preparing, perhaps they would have more time to take better note of what their customers and employees want.

Nothing is for free.
And this includes the Internet which was created by US security agencies.

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response,the United States formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military. In 1962 RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack. Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network. "Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

In 1968 ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits. The US defense establishment now had its ears on the best minds of the nation's universities. In 1972 The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA) ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network. In 1973 development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf (surfing the Internet) from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

In 1974 we saw the first use of term "Internet" by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol. In 1976 Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. This was a crucial component to the development of LANs. The packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet Satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe.Surprisingly, it used INTELSAT satellites that were owned by a consortium of countries and not exclusively the United States government. UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later. The Department of Defense began to experiment with the TCP/IP protocol and soon decided to require it for use on ARPANET.

In 1984 the ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks. While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone.

In 1994 no major changes were made to the physical network. The most significant thing that happened was the growth. Many new networks were added to the NSF backbone.Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the INTERNET during this time period. Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page. First Virtual, the first cyberbank, opens. ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode, 145Mbps) backbone is installed on NSFNET. The National Science Foundation contracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies. $50 annual fee is imposed on domains, excluding .edu and .gov domains which are still funded by the National Science Foundation.

Today the FBI's Carnivore computer is reading this story in real time coming from Israel and all e-mails you send which contain key words relevant to US national security. And the FBI is only one intelligence organization involved in cyber warfare. Don't think that Israel's Mossad is sitting passively.

Is there privacy on the Internet?
Not quite. And don't expect any in the coming days.
Solution: Go find a pen, a piece of paper and a postage stamp if you require personal or commercial privacy.
Otherwise, surf the Net. Like the ocean, it is wide open with many fish. From the pretty yellow and red small tropical "nemos" to grey sharks and long, black barracudas.

If your computer starts to work slowly and you hear your hard drive grinding and working like mad but you see nothing happening on your monitor - you may most likely have an Israel, Syrian, Saudi, Japanese, Chinese or US "shark" spying on your hard drive. It could be the FBI, your mother or the store next door.

With Globes

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