Your body is the next frontier in cybercrime
By Laura Hood October 1, 2013
Laura Hood is a commissioning editor for the digital
economy at The Conversation.
If you think it’s enough of a chore trying to stop
thieves stealing your credit card details and hacking your Facebook, imagine
trying to stop them getting into your pancreas.
Advances in healthcare mean that in-body devices to treat
chronic conditions or even just make you perform better as a human being are
not as far away as you might imagine.
Some of these innovations already exist. The pacemaker
has been around for years and drug delivery implants are already quite
advanced. Some are controlled remotely and many more will be in the future,
significantly raising the stakes in the battle to protect ourselves from
cyber-crime.
When TV series Homeland featured a storyline in which
terrorists hacked the US vice president’s pacemaker, causing him to have a
heart attack, it brought this issue into the public consciousness. But the
scenario has been possible for some time, says Sadie Creese, director of the
Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity at the Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford, and more and more people will be vulnerable in the
future.
“I think the future of chronic disease control will be
implanted devices,” she said, speaking after a talk at FutureFest, an event
held in London last weekend. “They will be measuring vital signs, reaching back
to the healthcare providers, whoever that might be and wherever they’re based.
So you can imagine consultants and doctors around the world, or your local
doctor, firing up a single app and being able to receive alerts on a patient.”
Demonstrating this future phenomenon in action during
FutureFest, social psychologist Bertolt Meyer allowed a fellow speaker to control
his bionic hand using an iPhone app connected via bluetooth.
“My hand comes with an iPhone app. There is an app for
that. This gives the word hacking an entirely new dimension because if someone
hacked my phone they could hack my hand. There’s a trickle down effect of
things we are able to do,” he said.
While many people won’t have to worry about having their
limbs controlled remotely like Meyer, in-body devices are not as far away as we
might imagine. Meyer noted that it is already possible to hack into delivery
systems for diabetics, meaning that criminals could remotely deliver fatal
doses of insulin.
As devices like bionic arms become more advanced, it is
not inconceivable that people might choose to replace functioning body parts
with high performance models. Meyer’s state-of-art hand can rotate a full 360
degrees. How many of us can say that?
Add to this a number of people who will choose to have
voluntary surgery or have devices implanted in order to improve their basic
health or appearance, and the implications are even more serious. “The truth of
the matter is, it’s kind of already here but mainly for significant conditions.
Give it five to ten years and we’ll all be wandering around with devices,” adds
Creese.
Creese believes the general public needs to start
engaging with the debate about their information now rather than leaving it
until the technology develops further.
“When we think about cyborg futures, be that healthcare
or play, we need to get on top of how we make this citizen centric and how we
achieve a fair relationship between people and commerce. In understanding that
relationship we’ll understand cyber-security.”
Even before we start taking technology into our bodies,
cyber-security threats are changing all the time and individuals are implicated
more than ever. While attacks on major companies have been the big prize for
criminals and hackers until now, targeting individual consumers is becoming
almost as financially lucrative. Now that organized crime organizations have
come to embrace cyber-attacks as a tool, the threat is more real than ever.
“Put yourself in a bad person’s position. If nobody can
bear to go without their online life, how much are you willing to pay not to
give it up? Criminals can lock systems and then charge a ransom to unlock it.
Much smaller organisations are being targeted and it’s not unthinkable that you
could do some kind of mass version of that against just consumers. If everybody
was willing to pay £100 to keep their stuff, and you attack 100,000 people,
that’s quite a big payday.”
For Creese, it seems people will only start to take these
issues seriously when they personally suffer the consequences.
“I think that the real change and the real concern will
come from the general population when more people start to feel pain,” she
said.
“Whether that’s the lights going out or no one being able
to go to hospital one day or whether that’s not being able to get on the
internet for the whole weekend. People have different pain thresholds but in
general I think when more people start to feel pain from cyber-attacks there
will be a change in the public consciousness. It won’t just be about
governments and defence companies anymore.”
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