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It has been 70 years since two Iowa State University professors whipped up the world’s first electronic digital computer, which is plenty of time for bad guys to get the upper hand. So we’ve come full circle, and ISU professors nowadays are landing grants to defend against evil spammers and cyber criminals.

Yong Guan, for example, has filed an application for a patent on a way to reduce “click fraud,” which refers to faking the number of hits to get more money out of advertisers.

Guan, who is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, also has some wireless security projects in the works, funded to the tune of $750,000 by the National Science Foundation; a method for protecting the identity of Internet users when, for example, they’re buying medicine or voting; and technology to help law enforcement authorities track down cyber criminals and attackers.

Funding for the latter includes $1.2 million from the Disruptive Technology Office, which sounds like something out of an action movie but is actually a part of the federal government’s intelligence community. Possibly a murky part. It’s hard to tell.

Iowa State also is home to the Information Assurance Center, which combines the efforts of faculty members from various academic departments to discuss security issues. That program led to the Center for Information Protection.

Then there’s the Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment, another offshoot of the Information Assurance Center; this is where a virtual Internet is exposed to real attacks as a way to test defense mechanisms.

It would be nice to have all the defense we can find. Using the Internet these days can make you think we have created a monster and now find ourselves trapped with it in an elevator.

For anyone sailing the cyber seas solo, such fears are probably quite well founded.

“In some sense, it has gotten worse for the individual,” according to Doug Jacobson at ISEAGE. The focus there is on large networks, not home computers, and “as we build better fences – which is what we tend to do as humans, we build fences and stand behind them – attackers tend to target the individuals.”

Typically, hackers are out to swipe information or to use individual computers as part of a spam-sending network. The bigger and faster the network, the more appealing it is to people with nefarious intentions. For example, “here at Iowa State, they like to grab our computers to store pirated movies, because we have a high-speed network,” Jacobson said.

According to IronPort Systems, a Web security products provider, we’re up to 120 billion spam messages worldwide every day. In 2007, “more than 83 percent of spam contained a URL to a rogue Web server,” the company says on its Web site, and URL-based viruses increased 250 percent.

“Many administrators believe they have secured their infrastructures, and that spam is nothing more than an irritant,” IronPort says. “The truth: Spam is being used as a gateway, designed to lure users to dangerous sites.”

Even at a university stocked with students who grew up with computers and sprinkled with world-class computer experts, “all it takes is one person to make that one mistake,” Jacobson said, and eventually someone does.

Security definitely sounds like a growth industry, and ISU seems to be in position to take in lots of grant money. Many universities conduct computer security research, but Jacobson said ISU is among the leaders.

“Iowa State is one of the top five” universities in the field, he claimed. The National Security Agency has designated about 85 colleges and universities as centers of excellence, and ISU is the only school from our state on the list. “We were one of the first seven to be certified,” Jacobson said.

Not only does this specialty bring in federal money, but students all over the world, including members of the military in Europe and Asia, take ISU courses in computer security online, Jacobson said.

It would have been terrific if Iowa State University had patented that first computer and made Central Iowa rich when the information revolution began. But at least we’re cashing in on phase two.