Reader’s Digest USA – May 2020
English | 131 pages | pdf | 48.54 MB
Hacks of Terror
A few years ago, when hackers stole my identity and filed a fake tax return in my name, it felt spooky. Someone had my name, Social Security number, employer’s name, and more, all to be used at their whim. Yet that invasion seems harmless compared with the “business model of surveillance” that has taken control of our homes and lives.
Bruce Schneier, who coined that term, is a respected cybersecurity expert who hates sloppy, worst-case thinking that exaggerates risk. But lately he has been sounding the alarm, describing how
our phones, cars, TVs, refrigerators, thermostats, CCTVs, and even light bulbs are becoming a single vulnerable system of computers—and, yes, they are all now computers—connected via the Internet. From there, Schneier explains, it’s frighteningly easy for terrorist groups, totalitarian states, and depraved individuals to weaponize that connectivity.
The picture he paints isn’t a Roger Moore–era Bond movie. It’s our inevitable future, in which bad actors who are good hackers create chaos in all sorts of ways. They remotely crash our cars. They sabotage our implanted medical devices. They hijack our cities by disabling millions of light bulbs or jacking up our thermostats until we pay ransom.
We’ve already seen how these backdoor takedowns can occur. Target had its data stolen by way of its HVAC provider. A casino got hacked via its Internet-controlled fish tank. In 2017, the Chinese military stole financial data from about 143 million Americans by hacking Equifax, though nothing much came of it. Today, that same hack could be catastrophic. With only a laptop and credit card, the bad guys could access the exploding market for data to learn every hidden quirk of those 143 million people. (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al. freely rent out what they know about us.) Then they’d be armed to inflame division between us. Our cover story at Reader’s Digest USA magazine May 2020 issue reports protections that we should all follow.
Write me how you deal with this mess. This pressing topic and our coverage of it has only just begun.
Bruce Kelley,
editor-in-chief
Write to me at
[email protected].
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