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I have decided to submit a story from the hypothetical future, published by New York Magazine 9 months ago, one that I picked while browsing whatever I missed since my last visit on Schneier on security.
If you put your video-game aside, read this article, and pay attention to the left-side notes, you'll discover thingies in the near future history which you may missed when they actually happened — the election campaign was on at that time. Most of the "fictionals" depicted there actually happened; some that I was aware of, some others I wasn't (e.g. water utility hacked).
On December 4, 2017, at a little before nine in the morning, an executive at Goldman Sachs was swiping through the day's market report in the backseat of a hired SUV heading south on the West Side Highway when his car suddenly swerved to the left, throwing him against the window and pinning a sedan and its driver against the concrete median. [...] When the Goldman exec came to, his driver swore that the crash hadn't been his fault: The car had done it.
[...] A third-year resident in the emergency room at Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights walked through the hospital as a television was airing images from the accident on the George Washington Bridge; that meant several crash victims would soon be heading her way. When she got to her computer, she tried logging into the network to check on the patients who were already there, but she was greeted with an error message that read WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR BITCOIN THIS TIME.
[...] One Police Plaza had just reported that it, too, was locked out of the programs it used to dispatch officers and emergency personnel, which made responding to the traffic accidents around the city that much harder.
[...] After a few phone calls to friends in the private sector, the cybersecurity chief got more nervous. At the beginning of 2017, one friend told him, she had been called to investigate a mysterious occurrence at a water-treatment plant: The valves that controlled the amount of chlorine released into the water had been opening and closing with unexplained irregularity.
[...] In the summer of 2016, the hackers received an anonymous offer of $100 million to perform a cyberattack that would debilitate a major American city. The group's members weren't much interested in death and destruction per se, so they declined their funder's request for a "Cyber 9/11." But to self-identified anarchists with a reflexively nihilistic will to power, the proposition had some appeal. Causing disruption was something that had been on their minds recently, as their conversations veered toward the problems with global capitalism, the rise of technocentrism, bitcoin, and the hubris required to nominate a man like Donald Trump.
Happy reading.
[Ed. Note: Just as a clarification: this is not fact, but a projection of something that could easily come to pass. All the pieces of this hypothetical attack are possible. Scary stuff.]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:24PM (4 children)
Yep - it's a good story. Thirty years ago, it was a good work of fiction. This story WAS written years ago, by another author - but being senile, I can't remember who wrote it. I read it, written from a young girl's point of view. The city was computerized, and the computers went berserk. The terms "hacker" wasn't used, if I recall correctly, but the story was the same.
And, we, fools that we are, have embraced computer control of every facet of our lives. It's time we woke up and smelled the coffee. The more we rely on computers, the more likely this scenario is to happen in real life.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fubari on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:50PM (3 children)
Runaway1956, I will call shenanigans on "smell the coffee". You're being (perhaps unintentionally) incomplete.
Seriously.
I am pretty aware of the level of automation our society and economy is embracing.
"Smell the coffee" and then do [i]what[/i] ?
Go back to manual typewriters?
Index cards and filing cabinets?
Go Full-on-Amish?
Ok, more practically... there are counter measures that one can take to balance risk.
1) Basic stockpiling, for example. Do you have food and water stashed away for 4 days? How about 30 days? What difference does it make if your threat model includes zombies, hurricane, earthquakes, EMP, or hackers?
2) Avoid IOT devices (rember, the S in IOT stands for Security). I have yet to see anything IOT that I can't live without.
So those were my 2 positive contribution to the discussion. :-)
I'll encourage you to reply with suggestions beyond, you know, "smelling the coffee."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 07 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)
"Smell the coffee" and then do [i]what[/i] ?"
Forget the cloud. Just abandon it - your data doesn't need to be "out there".
Forget about that IOT. Everyone of those devices is a vulnerability.
Scrap Facefook. Just tell Suckerberg that he can't offer you anything worth the data he is mining.
And, we can march on Washington, demanding that congress dismantle the NSA and all the other alphabets spying on us day in and day out.
Unfortunately, I have little faith in humanity. We will continue to grasp every bauble tossed our way, heedless of the cost of those baubles. No one is drinking the coffee.
(Score: 2) by fubari on Tuesday March 07 2017, @10:44PM
You're probably right. *sigh*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @07:41PM
Real security, that's all we need. It won't be perfect, but it will be a hell of a lot safer than the (supposedly) totally vulnerable system we have now. Will it cost a lot of money? YES. Will it create jobs? YES! Will it make our nation more secure? YES!!! C'mon Donald, get your shit together and try fixing some real problems instead of just burning down the barn.