Connect First, Worry Later

What have we done. The growth of technology has so far outpaced safety measures, that it’s now difficult to ever see the two being on the same plane.

This week I came across one of the most frightening scenarios yet. Kevin Roose, who produces a TV show of documentaries at RealFuture TV, challenged a couple of hackers to go ahead and destroy his life. They did.

One day he was sitting at his dining table, going about his email, when suddenly a voice from the vicinity of his laptop said, ‘You look bored.” He checked all the tabs on his browser — nothing. It then dawned on him that this was the hacker.

“The same hacker who, for the prior two weeks, had been making my life a nightmare hellscape — breaking into my email accounts, stealing my bank and credit card information, gaining access to my home security camera, spying on my Slack chats with co-workers, and—the coup de grâce—installing a piece of malware on my laptop that hijacked my webcam and used it to take photos of me every two minutes, then uploaded those photos to a server owned by the hacker,” Roose writes. And the frightening thing was how easy the hacker pair found it to get all the information and access they needed with a mix of ‘social engineering’ and tech know-how. Searching for his video on this nightmare scenario is something I’d highly recommend so you know what you’re dealing with — not that one can win the battle against a hacker.

They got bits of the information they needed from different places so it wouldn’t make customer service personnel at banks, etc., suspicious. A sound recording of a baby crying in the background put the finishing touches to a request for change of pin when one of the hackers pretended to be a harried wife who couldn’t get access to an account. It’s what happened to journalist Mat Honan some four years ago, though he hadn’t asked for it. But even as far as 15 years ago, it could have happened to me when I just lost track of my master password and asked some tech colleagues to help. In minutes, they handed me my lost password, smirking a little smugly. And it was a pretty complex one at that and not something that one could guess at like my birthday or some such thing.

Worse than all this has been laid bare in many a movie such as Black Mirror. But here we are years later and about to enter a new era of everything being connected and we haven’t managed to properly infuse safety into the technology we now carry with us everywhere.

As connected products begin to go mainstream, we’re going to see them being more and more vulnerable to hacking. This was forcefully brought to the world’s attention just recently when Nissan disabled its Leaf app because security researchers found it would be easy enough for someone to get access to various controls, in this case climate control, and just as dangerously, location data. Imagine someone tracking you real carefully and burgling your house while you’re safely away. Or waiting for the right time to stop your car and...

Nissan will come back with a fix, apparently, but it’s what all other car makers should also be looking at for their smart cars. And it’s no less than what other products should do, including banks and online services and stores which are the starting point for information.