News in the Category "Click Here to Kill Everybody"
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Schneier's "Click Here To Kill Everybody"
Pervasive connected devices mean we REALLY can't afford shitty internet policy
Bruce Schneier (previously) has spent literal decades as part of the vanguard of the movement to get policy makers to take internet security seriously: to actually try to make devices and services secure, and to resist the temptation to blow holes in their security in order to spy on “bad guys.” In Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, Schneier makes a desperate, impassioned plea for sensible action, painting a picture of a world balanced on the point of no return.
Click Here… describes a world where all the bad policy decisions of PCs and laptops and phones are starting to redound onto embedded systems in voting machines and pacemakers and cars and nuclear reactors. He calls this internet-plus-IoT system the “Internet+” and the case he makes for its importance is by turns inspiring and devastating…
Kirkus Review: Click Here To Kill Everybody
Big Brother is watching and scheming and up to no good—and, writes security technologist Schneier (Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, 2015), it looks like he’s winning.
By way of an opening gambit, the author posits three scenarios in which hackers take over machines and computer systems, from printers to power plants, both to demonstrate their ability to do so and to show how the interdependence of the web can easily be put to work against us. In one of those scenarios, real-world to the core, Russian hackers came into a Ukrainian power plant through a malware backdoor, “then remotely took control of the center’s computers and turned the power off.” That’s not just a threat to life, but it also erodes trust in social and economic systems, the basis for civil society. In another scenario, which gives the book its title, a “bio-printer” is hacked to “print a killer virus”—and does. Given all this, why don’t the governments and corporations of the world band together to do a better job of cybersecurity? Because, Schneier answers, there are powerful forces that thrive on the “wicked problem” of cybersecurity and insecurity, for one thing; for another, “big companies with few competitors don’t have much incentive to improve the security of their products, because users have no alternative.” With due pessimism, the author argues that individuals must do their best to harden their own security even as governments battle against encryption, anonymity, and other security measures by claiming that the “Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse—terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime”—will be the ultimate beneficiaries of secure systems. On a larger level, Schneier proposes resilient systems that provide multiple defensive layers as well as reform of international laws and the establishment of protocols for enhanced protection against the real bad guys…
Governments Want Your Smart Devices to Have Stupid Security Flaws
Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World Bruce Schneier W. W. Norton (2018)
Hardly a day now passes without reports of a massive breach of computer security and the theft or compromise of confidential data. That digital nightmare is about to get much worse, asserts security technologist Bruce Schneier in Click Here to Kill Everybody, his critique of government inertia on Internet security.
The burgeoning threat, writes Schneier, arises from the rapid expansion of online connectivity to billions of unsecured nodes. The Internet of Things, in which physical objects and devices are networked together, is well on its way to becoming an Internet of Everything. Over the past decade or so, a growing number of products have been sold with embedded software and communications capacity: household appliances, cars, medical instruments and even clothing can now be monitored and controlled from afar. More of the same is on the way, as smart homes yield to smart cities and automated systems assume a larger role in the management of critical infrastructure. The Stuxnet computer worm used to attack Iran’s uranium-enrichment programme remotely in 2010 was an early, audacious indicator of the threat…
Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier
The early architects of the internet did not want it to kill anybody. In cyber security expert Bruce Schneier’s new book, David Clark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalls their philosophy: "It is not that we didn’t think about security. We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them".
Schneier describes how the internet, developed as a gated community, is now a battleground where these untrustworthy people cause great harm: harnessing computers to kill by crashing cars, disabling power plants and perhaps, soon enough, using bioprinters to cause epidemics…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.