It is any Monday in 2020. Susana takes the train to her company, where she has been working for three months as deputy director of a consulting company. It always comes first thing in the morning. But when you swipe your access card, the door is still closed; something strange happens. He calls the vigilante, who tries to unlock it with his, without success. Fortunately, there is a lock and they open with the key. In her office, Susana turns on the computer and the screen only leaves four spaces to enter a numeric password that she has never typed. When he uses his cell phone to call the IT specialists, the phone turns off. Our protagonist was sure she had plenty of battery. Find the charger and plug it into the power: the device comes to life as fresh from the factory, ready to be set up. Surprised, she takes out her laptop, where she keeps a backup of the data stored on her smartphone. But the laptop shuts down and also asks you to enter a password.
Suddenly the possibility comes to his mind that the contacts, the photos of his children, everything, has vanished. With a knot in his stomach, he begins to suspect that he has been the target of a cyber attack. At that moment, the office phone rings: her husband is alarmed, after trying unsuccessfully to withdraw money from the ATM. The bank has just called you: they don’t have cash in their daily account due to a series of very high expenses incurred over the weekend. Susana rummages in her bag. All documents are in order, no credit card is missing. She had always been very careful with passwords, and it would certainly never occur to her to provide her details to e-mails of strange origin, which she routinely trashed. How could it happen?
“Good” hackers warn about new crimes
Marc Goodman, founder of the Future Crimes institute and former adviser to the FBI and Interpol, offers the explanation of our hypothetical case in his revealing book The crimes of the future (Ed. Ariel): it is due to a fault or false door in the sticker that contains an electronic circuit called radio frequency identification (RFID). It is designed to be read by a scanner from a hundred meters away. Susana takes her in her car to automatically pay the toll, on the hotel room electronic key, on the metro pass … and on her credit cards. She could not suspect that this attractive man named Francis Brown, with a certain John Cusack air – the same one she used to meet sometimes on the train, with whom she even half flirted – was carrying a hidden scanner in his backpack to read the contents of his cards, while offering him coffee in a plastic cup and giving him conversation.
Brown really exists: he is a dedicated hacker for good ends, a director of the Bishop Fox company of Arizona. He has invented an RFID reader capable of remotely extracting information even from wallets or bags. His job is to introduce us to how the thieves of a future that is already here can operate. He wants to prevent these high-tech crooks from stealing our wallets without putting their hands in our pockets, and that is why in his lectures he denounces the vulnerabilities of RFID technology, patented in 1983 by Charles Walton, founder of Proximity Devices, in California.
The stickers that incorporate it, we are now told, will turn any object into something intelligent and will promote the so-called internet of things in five years. There are other platforms available, such as closed field communication (NFC), which are already used for mobile payments via Android. They will make the interconnected world possible, but they are far from perfect and, above all, secure.
And what exactly is the internet of things? Look around. The customers of the restaurants, the travelers of airports or subway stations, the people who cross the zebra crossings without looking, the new Chinese tourists who visit the pyramids of Egypt … all have their eyes fixed on the screens of their mobile phones or their tablets, to the delight of the tech giants, who enjoy the largest income statements in the modern economy. In 2016, things are us. The people around you have lost an important part of their privacy; it cannot even be said to have been a poor seller. All their messages, photos and contacts, their location, the friends they have lunch with, the voices that are recorded when they call a company for any management, their emails, their tax and personal data, their addresses, their tastes, their customs or your favorite foods have gone from the intimate realm to being stored in endless rows of servers. Everything is in the cloud, in the guts of steel and concrete installations, in corridors of refrigerated hard drives and active 24 hours a day . “Privacy really doesn’t exist anymore, unless you go to live deep in the woods, without the internet,” says Jayne A. Hitchcock, writer and cybersecurity expert.
50 billion connected objects
Hitchcock anticipates the forthcoming publication of his book Cyberbullying & The Wild, Wild Web: When Anger & Revenge Get Out of Control . “Anyone who thinks they have a right to privacy is wrong. I usually explain to people who come to my conferences that when they publish something on the internet, it will stay there forever. But it is very difficult for them to think this way, because they believe that if they suffer a heat and then erase it, it has disappeared ”. Things are us … today. But in five years everything that has a chip will be hooked to the Internet , as Goodman warns us. If in 1950 a computer occupied an entire room, in 2014 the number of smartphones – actually small pocket computers – exceeded the number of people – more than 7,300 million – who connected to the Internet. To this must be added video game consoles, encoders, smart televisions and many other devices. In five years, to this list we will have to add refrigerators, coffee makers, washing machines, thermostats, light bulbs, speakers, security systems and monitors for babies, cars, helmets, mixers, toys and even garbage cans. That world will be made up of 50 billion objects that will communicate with each other.
The benefits and promises seem infinite … Our car will always choose the route with less traffic online, it will communicate with our house to regulate the temperature when we arrive and it will activate the bot stove to have dinner ready as soon as we walk through the door. We will pay insurance only for the exact time we drive, and based on how we drive. The refrigerator will notify us of missing food, and will place an order to make sure we will never run out of milk. Even the garbage can will have a chip to know how much organic matter there is ; it will be smarter than the computer in the Apollo XI capsule that took Armstrong to the Moon …
The other side of the coin is much less rewarding. Computer-speaking, we have dropped our pants and pulled the shower curtain . Our data is a huge gold mine for the companies that dominate the online market, but it is also pure gold for cybercrime, a mine of juicy illegal profits. A study by the consulting company Juniper Research, in the United Kingdom, estimates that cybercrime will lead to losses of a trillion euros! in 2019. “Global investments in computer security barely exceed 72,000 million dollars, when criminals take up to ten times that amount,” warns Alberto Hernández Moreno, director of Operations of the National Institute of Cybersecurity (INCIBE), in León.
The current panorama is already vast: emails with Trojan viruses to destroy your data; false doors to the bank’s website to empty your checking accounts; Identity theft to use you as a cover and commit other crimes … And, of course, the different scams in force, from the classic one of paying for something and not receiving it to romantic scams – ignoring a nonexistent and attractive girlfriend who wants to marry you and asks you for money in advance for the trip from Russia – to online pharmacies that sell counterfeit drugs that can kill you . Not to mention the cases of bullying and blackmail of adolescents who post compromising photos and videos of sexual content.
If you upload something to the Web, it will stay there forever
A particularly delicate field is that of health. Wi-Fi-enabled implantable medical devices (IMDs) are becoming commonplace. We have connected insulin pumps, neurostimulators, cochlear implants or defibrillators that allow physicians to monitor their patients in real time. This saves costs, unnecessary visits and saves lives in an unexpected emergency. However, online DMIs are vulnerable. Researchers from the universities of Massachusetts and Washington have proven this in trials, and the well-known hacker Barnaby Jack managed in 2012 to manipulate an implantable defibrillator with his laptop from fifteen meters away to release an electric shock capable of killing a person .
Have these types of crimes already occurred? Not yet. But as is often the case, fiction anticipates what might be real shortly. In the series Homeland , the terrorist Abu Nazir tries to kill the vice president of the United States via the Internet, manipulating his pacemaker. It is no coincidence that the doctors treating Dick Cheney, the former North American vice president, decided to remove Wi-Fi from their own device. All these cases suggest that the Web can become a sea where it is very easy to sink. The first solution, staying on the shore without letting the water touch your feet, means disconnecting from the world: writing letters to communicate, throwing mobile phones in the trash and dusting off the typewriter. But everyone is swimming and enjoying this cyber-ocean. “If you’re going to do something delicate, disconnecting is a good option, but unrealistic,” says Hernández. And he adds: “Who can resist the possibility of driving a car from your tablet or checking its status online?”
What to do then? The best weapon to immerse yourself in this sea of prodigies and criminal possibilities is, apart from the swimsuit and a life jacket, common sense. Do not leave it on the beach. Hernández believes that citizen education – in which INCIBE is committed – is the best weapon . “On the same day last year, we received 1,200 notifications from citizens who were victims of scams,” says this expert. And although it seems obvious, it is worth remembering his advice: do not share photos or data with strangers.
