THE WIRED INDEX
The denial-of-service episodes that hit some of the most visible sites on the Web (Yahoo!, eBay, E*Trade) revealed, once again, the fragile state of Internet security. So far, hackers haven't affected stock market averages or the health of the larger economy. But could they? Will future attacks be more damaging?
Web outages won't hurt the US economy anytime soon. Money passing through the sites attacked in February constitutes a mere rounding error in the $9 trillion scheme of things. Of course, sustained downtime would be devastating to any single company, making an arms race between hackers and Fortune 500 CIOs sadly inevitable. OfWired Index companies, Charles Schwab probably has the most to lose. AOL, Cisco, and Wal-Mart are at risk as well.
More ominous is the possibility that business and consumer confidence will sink in the wake of Internet security snafus. It's impossible to bury bad news on the Net. Once upon a time, when a company's computers went down, no one knew except employees and a few disgruntled customers. Now the whole world knows – instantly. If online business were disrupted broadly over a period of weeks or if cyberthieves pulled off a major heist, ecommerce could spin down to a moribund crawl.
Still, it's unlikely that security breaches alone will hobble the Web juggernaut. Carjacking happens, but we still drive because the odds are against any one of us being hit. As long as the Internet delivers value, people will use it, despite the dangers.
– Phil Hood (phood@actnet.com)
INDEX PERFORMANCE (as of 2/29/00)
| Name| Since 11/30/95| Previous 12 Mos. | YTD
| Wired Index| +455.28 % | +64.61 % | +6.14 %
| Nasdaq Composite| +343.42 % | +105.27 % | +15.40 %
| Dow Jones Industrials| +99.59 % | +8.83 % | -11.90 %
The Wired Index tracks 40 public companies selected by editors ofWired to serve as a bellwether for the new economy. For a complete description and the latest results, see stocks.wired.com.
| NEW MONEY
| Financial Services Monster Mash
| Webjacked
