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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?"
The Seduction
Imagine the world 10 or 20 tears into the future, when the IoT is becoming fully realized. Our homes and businesses have become a large network of every manner of "thing". Due to "network effects", the value of this technology and its ability to transform our lives has grown exponentially, way beyond what we could ever imagine. We are very bit as dependent on The Internet of Things as we were on the Internet of decades ago.
The Reality Today
The Internet, with all its wonders it has brought us, is out of our control. It appears there is no way to secure it. There is no end to hacks and vulnerabilities. Spam, viruses, malware, credit card breaches by the millions, military secrets stolen, loss of privacy on massive scale, DoS attacks, hacking into peoples web cams and microphones, entire systems p0wnd (Sony lately), billions upon billions of dollars in losses and damages. How can we go on like this? All the brilliant ideas of our best computer scientists to protect our computers and systems seem useless. The criminals are always one step ahead of us, no matter what we do.
If we could have predicted all the problems with the Internet as it is today, back when - would we have embraced it as we do now? It can only get worse with the IoT. Imagine when every day items start attacking you like some scene from a horror movie. It will become our worst nightmare.
We need to pause, step back, and look at the bigger picture.
Unfortunately, I have no answers. All I have are questions.