News in the Category "Click Here to Kill Everybody"
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Click Here to Kill Everybody, Book Review: Meeting the IoT Security Challenge
Sometimes the human race just isn’t that smart. The Internet of Things is a case in point: today’s internet is a mess of security vulnerabilities and coding errors. As the size of data breaches and cost of cyber attacks escalates week by week, now we want to exponentially increase the complexity, attack surface and dangers by wirelessing up billions of ultra-cheap devices, any one of which might bring the whole thing down. In the words of the great Jewish prophets: Oy.
Surveying the shape of this monster takes up the first third of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, …
A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared
More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.
No one really believed them, so few tried to stop them. Then before anyone realized it, the deed was done: Just about everyone had a Windows machine, and governments were left scrambling to figure out how to put Microsoft’s monopoly back in the bottle.
This sort of thing happens again and again in the tech industry. Audacious founders set their sights on something hilariously out of reach—Mark Zuckerberg wants to connect …
Click Here To Kill Everybody Book Review
Even the author Bruce Schneier admits the title is clickbait. Is all our technology so interconnected that someone could click here to kill everybody?
Schneier opens his book with three scenarios of how technology could kill.
- Hackers could remotely disable car brakes, take over steering and even turn off the engine.
- Hackers could remotely shut down an electric power station in winter.
- 3D bio printers could be hacked to create and print a killer virus causing a worldwide pandemic.
Two of those scenarios have already happened in the last three years…
Bruce Schneier's Click Here to Kill Everybody Reveals the Looming Cybersecurity Crisis
Excerpt
The US government and Silicon Valley have designed and created an insecure world to maximize political control and corporate profit, but in the cyberphysical world we now live in, where cars, planes, trains and nuclear power plants are connected to the internet, that deliberate insecurity must be reversed—for safety reasons, or people are going to start dying, Bruce Schneier argues in his new book, Click Here to Kill Everybody (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018).
The days of “going online” are over. We now live on the internet. The merger of meatspace and cyberspace is well underway, and today cybersecurity is the security of all the things, including the things that can kill us. This new world demands we rethink the economic and political incentives that have us teetering on the brink of disaster, Schneier believes…
Click Here To Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World (Book Review)
Seasoned technologist and security writer Schneier’s (Data and Goliath; Liars and Outliers) work springboards from the “Internet+ of Things” (IoT), or the network of physical devices including cars, electronics, machinery, that connect to one another and exchange data. For this work, the author coins the term Internet+, taken to mean “the Internet + Things + us.” By offering a broad introduction to the concept, Schneier aims to familiarize readers to topics and issues surrounding it and to draft a road map toward solutions. Such an approach is challenging; the introductory chapters address IoT concerns that more informed readers may already be aware of, whereas the later, more technical chapters are too specialized for general audiences. Readers who enjoyed Andrew Blum’s …
Publishers Weekly Review of Click Here to Kill Everybody
Schneier (Data and Goliath), a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, provides a clear perspective on the threat posed by the evolution of the internet into what is commonly referred to as the “internet of things.” As “everything is becoming a computer… on the Internet,” with even pedestrian items such as light bulbs or refrigerators collecting, using, and communicating data, the convenience and efficiency of such “smart” technology comes at the cost of increased vulnerability to the schemes of crafty hackers. Horror stories, such as a vehicle’s controls being taken over remotely, are not new, but Schneier’s vast experience enables him to tie together many strands and put them in context. For example, after discussing the inherent security issues with software (there are “undiscovered vulnerabilities in every piece”), Schneier goes on to observe that such flaws are only part of the problem; he convincingly demonstrates that a major, if not the main, reason, for an insecure internet is that its “most powerful architects—governments and corporations—have manipulated the network to make it serve their own interests.” Schneier concedes that his book has “a gaping hole” in not explaining how his nuanced recommendations for increasing security and resilience could become policy, but it is a useful introduction to the dimensions of the challenge…
Open Letters Review on Click Here to Kill Everybody
Electronic security expert Bruce Schneier’s studiously terrifying new book Click Here To Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, is a concerted counter-playbook to the end of human civilization, and the deaf ears it will fall upon have been deadened by two completely erroneous assumptions: that an unregulated Internet is better than a regulated one, and that Internet problems only affect people on the Internet.
Ninety percent of Schneier’s readers have more than one “smart” electronic device, be it a cellphone or a tablet or a laptop or a new-model automobile. And ninety percent of that ninety percent have the same personal password for all of those separate devices and haven’t changed that password in years. Virtually every single one of Schneier’s readers who choose to download his book instead of buying a printed copy in a bookstore leaves a wide and easily-followed data-trail back to themselves. Every one of Schneier’s readers who orders a printed copy of the book from online retailers like Amazon leaves an equally-accessible data-trail and never even thinks not to. Many of Schneier’s reader who decide to buy a printed copy in a bookstore will use some kind of electronic preferred-customer discount card, and the bookstore’s cash register system is electronically linked to its inventory system, and both systems have a D-grade security setup that a computer-literate 10-year-old could hack wide open. And a great many of those customers probably used the store’s free Wi-Fi while they were browsing, which means any malware prowling that Wi-Fi is now in their phone, which means it will be in their laptop later that evening when they plug their phone into it to charge…
Takeaways from Bruce Schneier's New Book
FIX THE INTERNET BEFORE IT FIXES US— Technologist Bruce Schneier is out with his latest book and his most alarming title yet: “Click Here to Kill Everybody.” In fact, it’s one of the most ominous in the entire cybersecurity canon. Even in his introduction, Schneier admits to hyperbole, yet writes the title isn’t without merit since “we’re already living in a world where computer attacks can crash cars and disable power plants—both actions that can easily result in catastrophic deaths if done at scale.”
So, OK, it’s scary. In this outing, published last week, Schneier digs into the dangers posed by the rapid spread of internet connectivity into all our things. But since he doesn’t think the marketing term “internet of things” is encompassing enough, he coined his own term: Internet+. If you’ve followed Schneier’s career or seen his many talks at cybersecurity conferences, much of what he’s writing about won’t seem new. And since that’s probably many of you, we’re going highlight just a few of his policy recommendations (there are many more in the book) and predictions (more of those, too) when it comes to fixing what he calls the “sloppy state of Internet+ security.”…
Book Review: Click Here to Kill Everybody
The great and memorable title of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Click Here to Kill Everybody, certainly caught the eye of those in my household—my children kept trying to touch the button on the front cover to ‘kill everybody’! (Indeed, the book’s attention-grabbing title may make me a little wary about reading it openly on the Tube or while going through airport security.)
Of course, the book is not really about how to kill everybody, but rather how, from an ethical standpoint on the part of tech, and a moral standpoint on the part of government, we appear to be sleep-walking into a scenario where something, whether by accident or design, could possibly ‘click here’ and kill everyone…
Book Review: “Click Here To Kill Everybody”
If I were still doing radio shows, I would happily welcome Bruce Schneier back as a guest. He’s a security expert who I first spoke with when he revealed the uselessness of the TSA’s screening procedures at airports, which he labelled “security theater.” Since then, he’s made multiple appearances with me.
Bruce has just published a new book, Click Here To Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, and asked me to review it.
As in his previous works, Bruce sees the holes that exist in the digital world and explains the risks of having so many more things connected as part of the Internet of Things, from thermostats to refrigerators to manufacturing equipment to your kid’s dolls. In an age where everything is a computer, my favorite example he cites is the casino network that was penetrated by hackers in 2017 through an internet-connected fish tank…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.