Writing code is black/white. It either works or it doesn't yet, at the same time, very few software programs are perfect in terms of being secure, a fact that becomes an irresistible draw to hackers finding and exploiting just one flaw residing in the target software in question in order to gain access to systems of all kinds as no internet environment is invulnerable as seen by successful cyberattacks conducted agains the US over the past few years, something most disquieting even though the specter of AI, the open ended tech we no longer know how it actually works looms, a digital/analogue construct rapidly evolving beyond our ability to control in any way, shape or fashion.
It would take only one flaw. In billions of lines of code, one flaw — and the banking system, power grid, Pentagon, air traffic control system, hospitals, and the world’s logistics can all be taken down. And the effort may already be underway.
The internet was never built with security in mind. According to our guest in this week’s WhoWhatwhy podcast — New York Times cybersecurity correspondent Nicole Perlroth, the author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends — it was originally thought that at most a couple hundred computers would be connected to the internet.
Today the world is totally interconnected, from our cars and refrigerators to our nuclear reactors and air traffic control systems. So we have good reason to be afraid, very afraid.
We get a picture of how Russian hackers, using our privacy laws against us, set up shop in New Jersey.
Perlroth details a bizarre sign of the times — a company openly operating in the international business of buying and selling security flaws, which are called “zero days” — and why any hacker who discovers such flaws can make millions in the global marketplace. This is the new international arms trade.
And if all of this isn’t scary enough, if knowing that all of your passwords have already been hacked doesn’t make you paranoid, the coming AI revolution will set all of this on steroids.
We have been warned.
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