Every day, large and small companies are pinged, sometimes by scammers after property and money, by governments after information, by organized thugs who want to drain your bank account and max out your credit line. Sometimes, they are teens, adept and brainy kids in the suburbs. Sometimes it’s a person or persons of an ideological bent.
Here, in Seattle, one company stands out as a target for hacking: Amazon.com.
Why is that? Amazon is being attacked for what it is and isn’t. Amazon delivers much at a reasonable price. Its fulfillment is convenient: You can get your stuff nearly right away in a clean, crisp, cardboard box or plastic envelope. A drone is being tested — maybe a new air force.
With Paul Allen, Amazon is remaking South Lake Union, creating a 21st-century technological hub and a thriving neighborhood economy. It employs a lot of people worldwide, and in Seattle, a lot of particularly bright people in the land of the geeks.
Still, as a historically important merchant of almost all things, Amazon has stepped on a lot of toes and driven competition out of business. It has changed the playing field, endangering small booksellers wherever it delivers and replacing big-box stores with big data. Once-mainstay brick-and-mortar department stores, like Sears in SODO and now JCPenney’s at Bellevue Square, have succumbed to the new economy epitomized by Amazon’s business plan.
It wasn’t just doors shutting on customers on Main Street. They closed on the owners and workers alike. Today, the company spars with the authors and publishers who made Jeff Bezos rich. It’s gotten so huge, so fast, that its international bragging rights include offending nations like France, Germany and Great Britain.
A dirty business
Most of us customers disconnect that the wonder delivered expressly to our eager hands is made possible by coal trains from Wyoming rumbling along the Duwamish River and the waterfront. The coal powers the overseas factories that make the products we order online and consume so avidly. The coal also returns as dispersed pollution that blows in from the Pacific, as far south as Los Angeles and Phoenix. The burning fouls the air of China.
Resource extraction — that’s what the mining and oil conglomerates call it — is a dirty business, but where would the shareholders and CEOs be without the dirt? It’s what Amazon is built on, a muddy cycle modern commerce can’t shake. Online retail is as much a part of it as fracking.
Amazon is at the top of that great commercial heap of being, with its metaphorical hands in every pocket and about as clean as Lady MacBeth’s.
Bezos didn’t name his company after the Amazon River or the rainforest. It’s from selling products from A to Z, and those chickens will come home to roost. That’s some of the ideology behind the effort to trip that profit flat. It echoes Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and Anonymous, a hacker collective that’s made trouble and headlines.
The coming attack
Within geek culture, there is a dark side of applied computer science. Who would apply it? Cybercrime is a true and present threat to Seattle business, to our public utilities and government. Of all the local targets, Amazon.com stands out as the Mount Everest of hacking.
Its security is renowned, with complex algorithms stemming each attack. It won’t be complexity that takes down Amazon for 30 minutes or a day — it will be simplicity.
I’m looking at slowloris. Slowloris is a denial of service executable that lives up to its name. It’s been around for a while; it’s all of 36 kilobytes. It opens a connection and doesn’t close it, and when enough instances do, it can cut traffic and trade. It’s the type of intrusion most public online entities contend with daily. It’s more of a nuisance: It puts you out of business for only so long.
What’s coming to Amazon.com may be slow, but it is coming. It’s not a matter of when; it’s a matter of what form of electronic ebola will infect the corporate body.
Computer viruses have this in common with their natural counterparts: They evolve to stay one step ahead of their host’s defense. For all purposes, they have achieved intelligence, however artificial, and will strive to survive as any life force.
So, this modest proposal, to help keep South Lake Union afloat. The Amazon is a river and a forest. In Seattle, we have the Duwamish and our greenbelts. Amazon.com is in a unique position to live up to its name, to restore our river and forests — if not those of the name Jeff Bezos stole. You’ll still be hit by no-goodniks, but you can be better than what you deserve.
CRAIG THOMPSON is a longtime community activist.
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