Machines that control us and could kill us

You should be very afraid of bots. Most people think of bots as automated avatars in a game or perhaps that search engine that crawls the web.  Bots are much more than that and you should worry about the machines that control you.

I'm not talking about The Matrix where the human race is enslaved to machines but rather the control that machines already exhibit on you day to day.  Your phone sends you a reminder and you are forced to respond to it.  Your car turns on the tire pressure light and you check the air pressure while at the gas station.  The robocall that tells you that your Dr. Appointment is tomorrow at 11 instead of 3pm.  All these seem like widely accepted pieces of technology we never second guess.

So on your way to the appointment that was moved to 11 you are sitting at the light in the left turn lane.  Your arrow turns green and pulling into the intersection you are suddenly struck by a semi going 45.  The driver did not run a red light rather the light was still green.  The computer program controlling the lights was reprogrammed.  How?  Any number of ways.  Most people however would not second guess the green arrow.  In fact this was planned because someone had hacked into the Robocall system and the street lamp.  Why?

Hacked Road Sign

Today people talk about securing their private information.  Credit cards, medical records, finances are all secured with encryption and countermeasures to hackers.  Hackers can still get in but we make it more difficult for them.  Nobody ever thinks about the Robocall system or the street lights.  We implicitly trust these systems day to day and they are vulnerable to attack.

Systems that we trust implicitly and systems that control our lives can just as easily kill us.  That may sound far fetched but the Zombies Ahead sign could have easily said MINIMUM 45MPH into a work area with a 25MPH limit.

Take this principal of hacking into low security systems and imagine the possibilities.  Hacking into web cams, personal computers, street lights.  You could use some of the simplest of systems to not only control someone but kill them.  While this may sound far fetched it is so much closer to a reality than you think.

Daniel Suarez wrote the book "Daemon" that illustrates this in brutal detail.  Being in IT I have read this book several times and it should be on every adults reading list to see just how far anyone can be manipulated by a machine.  In Daemon and it's successor Freedom (TM) Daniel outlines very real and very plausible ways a computer can kill you.

Books like this are not just works of fiction either.  The Therac-25 killed many people because of a computer bug.  A Medtronic heart device was found vulnerable to remote attacks in March 2008.  You can read about many major software bugs and vulnerabilities on Wikipedia's List of software bugs.

Does this mean we should be paranoid about computers controlling us?  Certainly not.  We should simply be looking at security and taking a holistic approach to it instead of securing systems at high risk.  A perfect example of this is the recent Russian hacker attacks and stealing of 1 Billion passwords. Security is often an afterthought.  It should be built in with everything that we do.  Sadly it's not.  We should also have some common sense about using technology but sadly we don't.  The only real way to combat this problem is to educate people.  Daniel Suarez does that in his book and I'm doing that on this blog.  I challenge everyone to review their own security and see just how hackable your life is.