As technology enters every facet of life, it changes the skillsets required of high-end hitmen:
When Scott Erven was given free rein to roam through all of the medical equipment used at a large chain of Midwest health care facilities, he knew he would find security problems–but he wasn’t prepared for just how bad it would be.
In a study spanning two years, Erven and his team found drug infusion pumps–for delivering morphine drips, chemotherapy and antibiotics–that can be remotely manipulated to change the dosage doled out to patients; Bluetooth-enabled defibrillators that can be manipulated to deliver random shocks to a patient’s heart or prevent a medically needed shock from occurring; X-rays that can be accessed by outsiders lurking on a hospital’s network; temperature settings on refrigerators storing blood and drugs that can be reset, causing spoilage; and digital medical records that can be altered to cause physicians to misdiagnose, prescribe the wrong drugs or administer unwarranted care.
As everything gets networked, and networks all connect to the internet, everything will be subject to control and exploitation. As technology progresses, you realize even Orwell and Huxley never dreamt that a government functionary in some basement office of an intelligence agency could remotely access an infusion pump in a hospital on the other side of the nation, and reset it to deliver a lethal overdose to someone his agency has officially classified as a troublesome little prick.
As time goes on, expect those skillsets to diffuse into the private sector – and be used more often there than in government. Add in extreme wealth, and you could end up with the extremely rich becoming a force even more powerful than the governments.
I can’t wait until we have large autonomous robots everywhere, doing everything from garbage disposal to armed law enforcement – and periodically going haywire for unknown reasons and killing people.
Now that would be an Apocalypse.
[…] Push Button Wet Work – The Internet Of Things Will Kill You […]
Law enforcement! ED-209! Yikes!
This doesn’t surprise me. Configuring all the security on a device takes time. Most come wide open because it is easiest for the manufacture to have them that way. Those that are somewhat secured have default passwords which everyone has access to.
About the only way to stop this would be to have all the devices off the network, which makes the time for managing a given medical device lengthier. Imagine an ICU. the desk nurse has 20 different IV pumps she can work remotely, time to work them collectively, very brief. But to go to each room and manual adjust them? lengthy.
that said, there are some areas where results will be worse because there are fewer people doing the work.
The cost of the initial computer security is probably on the order of 10 to 15 man hours, assuming you have a check list, and don’t have to create one. That doesn’t include responding to the security updates.
Now let me compound the problem. Each device has to get its existence blessed in the US by the FDA. This blessing is such that the systems used in production to control the robots that make the medical device have to be FDA approved, and can not be patched without going through another FDA approval process that takes years. So we have older more hackable versions of say windows running the production robot that makes the IV pump. What could a hacker do with that? probably limited, although they might be able to recode the code for the pump so there is a back door.
Although it probably isn’t even needed. What was once the service port for the technician will be networked together for the techs to remotely monitor, and then that will be hacked.
You might like Runaway. Its a criminally under appreciated Michael Crichton flick from 1984 staring Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons of all people
Basic premise for those who haven’t seen it Selleck is a future cop who hunts rogue robots called Runaways. I won’t spoil too much but the weapons are cool and mostly make sense (its pretty hard SF) the plot is interesting.
The automated farm scenes are very cool with a few Redneck/Overalls farmers being bot wranglers. No labor needed
and the background , well the one thing I will spoil is I don’t know whether its was intentional but we didn’t see a single natural “R” type anywhere. I guess all the NAMS were eliminated or sent to reservations or something. The civilians we see even are all trying to study robotics and math or are focused hard workers
I don’t know if the social outcomes are realistic, probably not with the way Rabiitism has colonized social signalling but it is thought through.
High recommended if you haven’t scene it and not very dated either.
Also the use of robots does go both ways, if its pretty hard to trust your human security or to have an economy without buyers and tiny robots little more than a walking rootkit could easily infiltrate and reprogram the elites robots even if they aren’t networked They tend to be so rabbity it would take once incident to send them all into meltdown.
Also if highly robots get pretty cheap , say the cost of a car. Small weak nations could have millions of soldiers they could release to do crippling damage to the civilian population of societies.
John Robb calls it Deep Maneuver
Terror groups with robots hidden to go on terror sprees. Self activating, 100% reliable.
Cheap computers and robots also mean cheap life sciences maybe self iterating making everything biologically unsafe on some level.
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/02/slow-maneuver-part-1-.html
So the new equilibrium assuming mankind even survives might end up in some very strange places, global communism like a snake eating its tail, the state provides a living basic income so that people can buy goods and have children so the rich have markets. Like what we have 10x or some new overlord class trying to regulate robots. I suspect the latter since we’ve seen Drone regulation already and frankly even a wise elite which we don’t have can’t really create a safe platform.
I could basically see ultra heavy automation taxes that discourage most automation as well just so society survives
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I’m expecting my kids (and their kids) to be hip to this sort of thing as it develops and be among the few who can prudently protect themselves.
It’s not for nothing that they worked at the Help Desk repairing students’ and residence hall staff computers while they were undergrads. (It might surprise most people to discover that even most Comp Sci majors can’t trouble-shoot the hardware or software of a PC.)
I’m glad you can laugh at this stuff. Makes a young guy like myself feel nothing but suicidal despair.
The ED 209:
https://youtu.be/A9l9wxGFl4k
I’ve been saying for years that we already live in a cyberpunk dystopia.
The r-types are constantly fantasizing about the ‘magic death button,’ the ultimate weapon of plausibly deniable passive aggression. They will be seduced by the opportunity, thinking that they can wage war without exposing themselves to violence. K-types would have to be prepared to break that illusion. One cannot push a button with broken fingers.
Westworld.
Are you and your readers too young to remember? 🙂