Security Experts Believe the Internet of Things Will Be Used To Kill Someone

dcblogs writes: Imagine a fleet of quad copters or drones equipped with explosives and controlled by terrorists. Or someone who hacks into a connected insulin pump and changes the settings in a lethal way. Or maybe the hacker who accesses a building's furnace and thermostat controls and runs the furnace full bore until a fire is started. Those may all sound like plot material for a James Bond movie, but there are security experts who now believe, as does Jeff Williams, CTO of Contrast Security, that "the Internet of Things will kill someone". Today, there is a new "rush to connect things" and "it is leading to very sloppy engineering from a security perspective," said Williams. Similarly, Rashmi Knowles, chief security architect at RSA, imagines criminals hacking into medical devices, recently blogged about hackers using pacemakers to blackmail users, and asked: "Question is, when is the first murder?"

Comments

Re:Most people would not do this

[Zontar The Mindless]

This.

Because America doesn't already have the highest per-capita rate of firearms ownership and the highest per-capita rate of homicides by firearm in the world.

Oh, wait...

Re:Most people would not do this

[binarylarry]

Seems the US is in the mid range here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Although I suppose the worst offenders are in the third world.

Michael Hastings - First Incident

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/21/report_michael_hastings_feared_his_car_had_been_tampered_with/

Re:Most people would not do this

[RingDev]

To be fair though, both Canada and Switzerland have forced conscription. So all of their native able bodied gun owners have completely weapons handling training at the military level.

-Rick