We're quickly heading toward the age of the first Virtual WMD. The implications can be as wide as your imagination, but possibly worse than existing WMDs.
Imagine Venezuela, but much much worse.
Picture a society that doesn't know how to create institutions, conduct trade and collaborate with the people around them without the aid of a computers.
Now, I don't know if disabling their computers would result in an incredibly dysfunctional society that would starve, but it's not unthinkable. If it did, the suffering could be far beyond the instant obliteration of millions of people.
Modern history is littered with examples of millions of people starving or being slaughtered because societies collapsed economically or politically.
> Who stands to benefit by destabilizing the western world to such a degree?
Who's limiting the conversation to the western world? Let's think beyond ourselves for a second. Wouldn't it be just as tragic if cyber attacks were used to destabilize other places in the world? Imagine an African country that has become entirely dependent on some sort of mobile money transferring platform. Maybe their neighbor launches an attack on that platform to destabilize the country for whatever nefarious reasons.
Yeah, I'm going to have to sort of disagree with you there. Once you are dead, you are dead. If you are starving, things can still change and you can still have free agency.
I'm comparing death by obliteration to death by starvation.
Sure, maybe you'll find a way to survive a famine, but on average most will die because the math just doesn't add up. Not enough food for everyone. And it ends up killing far more than bombs and bullets, even nukes. Disease and famine are far worse than WMD when the numbers are in.
So maybe we should round up all the poor people and gas them to put them out of their misery?
If we were to regard the life of the average poverty stricken human as being _terrible_, then killing them painlessly and suddenly becomes less abhorrent. Of course, then we need to define criteria for whose lives are of sufficiently bad quality where sudden death is a superior option.
Some nihilists might say all humans satisfy that criteria. Even if you're a wealthy and generally happy person, you will become old and die. If you were suddenly dead at this second with no warning, you would not care - the only downside would be those who remained alive, who presumably would care. Let's recurse until no one cares.
And the universe moves along just the same.
I am not advocating for this at all, but I felt your comment justified some sort of explanation. And I have been thinking about these existential questions quite a bit recently.
The problem is in times of crisis, the appreciation of market dynamics and rule of law tend to wane. Even if those things are intact, the flow of goods and services can be undermined by well-intentioned but misguided politicians.
My point was simple. Despite the systems of trade, a catastrophic shock in trade or production systems could literally kill millions in a way that is more brutal and horrific than instant obliteration.
The scarcity, Mukherjee writes, was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10...
I guess if I was to assume a scenario that could lead to the starvation of millions, I'd imagine a poorer country making the mistake of relying too much on some sort of electronic platform to trade and save their money. Let's say this country/region also relied too much on exporting some agricultural commodity that was being affect by a change in climate.
A catastrophic attack on their banking platform could theoretically destroy the local populations confidence in the trading currency as well as scare away foreign lenders. It may create incentives where it's more advantageous to hoard food and sell it on the international markets rather than distribute it to local customers who can't pay.
Free markets tend to create the most value in the long run. In some situations, hoarding can create incentives to distribute to underserved areas. In scenarios where the underserved areas do not have a means of payment (monetary, barter, indentured servitude, etc.), free markets and hoarding can simply be horrifyingly cruel.
What are your thoughts?
Systems have trade have made the market economy of the US more vulnerable to many kinds of "a catastrophic shock[s] in trade or production systems." IIRC, there are only a few days of slack in the US food supply chain. That's down from a month or two during the cold war (where I think there were mandates for reserves).
Just look at how many communications companies the US has. And the government had to step in and break that up because there used to be just one. Even now they are quietly conglomerating back together, and there are no significantly different options available. It's still very vulnerable to an attack or flaw due to lack of diversity.
It doesn't matter if C&C is corporate or state, they break the same way.
I'm already unsure of what the most possible damage someone could do with over-the-air automobile firmware updates is today, just to take one example. What would it be like if someone put out a virus that at 11:32:42am on March 3rd, 2036 causes every GM, Ford, and Tesla self-driving car to lock all the doors, floor the accelerator, and let the chips fall where they may?
Consider not just the immediate impact of the crashes, but the fact that you just completely obliterated emergency services (they couldn't hope to serve but a tiny fraction of the victims), choked every major road and most of the minor roads with wreckage, wrought a catastrophe so large that while I don't predict what the effects would be, we're talking something more defining for a generation that would handily compete with both World Wars combined for psychological effect, with the Great Depression tossed in for good measure... it would be astonishing.
I'm not even sure we couldn't get close to that in 2018, to be honest. What if by some horrors the Stuxnet authors were set the task of making this happen? How close could they get?
Infecting a cars is hard for other reasons. Radios tend to be easy to updated (they can sell you new features - maps if nothing else). All other controllers tend to be more locked down such that it is likely that a virus couldn't actually spread to anything that can take control.
Maybe, who knows who GM will change over the next 20 years. GM only has guesses.
Sorry, I conflated two things here. I meant someone in 2036 setting a logic bomb for something like a month in advance in their time, and as a separate question, how close one could get to such a virus today. As we keep wiring up our cars to networks (not necessarily "the Internet", but networks), it's only going to get easier.
One of the problems I think will happen with cars, only accelerated by self driving cars and the high probability that people will largely lease them rather than own them, is that the governments of the world are going to see a big pot of real-time surveillance data and real-time person control mechanisms and won't be able keep their hands off, mandating that cars start getting very connected and that cars have backdoors for authorities to take over and redirect them, etc. My scenario in 2036 may not even be a brilliant virus designer, but just one person with Python scripting skills and a bit too much access to the government control system.
It's not even that hard to imagine such a disaster happening accidentally. I'm sure, no sarcasm, that protections will be put into place, but there always has to be a developer back door mechanism of some sort, and there may be enough controls added, or they may not be added competently enough.
(And in terms of the protections of the cars themselves, remember that Stuxnet included the use of not one, but two code signing certificates that the Stuxnet authors clearly did not have true authority to use. If there's a way from the Internet to the control mechanism, even if it requires signed code, there's no guarantee a particularly capable and motivated enemy won't penetrate the protections.)
After the LocationSmart vulnerability, that seems very plausible. (If you haven't seen it: https://www.robertxiao.ca/hacking/locationsmart/)
Software which say opened the throttle and disabled the brakes on millions of vehicles simultaneously would be in the ballpark for total destruction in a short time. With self-driving cars, the total destruction can be optimized, hunting down pedestrians and hitting vulnerable infrastructure.
If you can pull this off for a continental scale, you're looking at potentially months to restore power to everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2015_Ukraine_power_gr...
However, there are absolutely things you could do in a power plant that greatly accelerate wear. It might be possible to accelerate wear enough to achieve failure of some parts before the next maintenance happens.
"Just shutting a plant off" on the other hand is not too difficult; for most plants and upstream systems "off" is the safe state, so all systems are designed to fail into that state, if they really have to.
Which makes me concerned about the future; if the transport network becomes electric, a power outage will cripple things even more. Unless we build self-contained, internet-disconnected charging stations maybe, but that's not going to be done at any kind of significant scale.
You can maybe drive a truck, but there is a lot more to a logistics pipeline then actually driving the truck. Without power the whole scheduling automation etc. has to be done manually, and it's by now simply impossible to do every automated job manually again.
Your logistics pipelines could maybe run at a few percent efficiency if every step is manual, but by then your trucks will be raided on the streets.
The bigger worry is gasoline in tanks is good for at most a month. The refinery is much harder to start/operate without power. They have their own backup power on site (I assume) so this might or might not be a real worry. If it is I'll just brew some ethanol.
Might be possible to get to them. But that's solving one problem. If we're talking continent scale blackout it's also unclear what that gets you.
Typical backup power is measured in hours or days. Black start time scale for a blackout that scale is potentially significantly longer than that.
Long before petrol in refineries runs out our logistics system that distributes food to people has failed. The water system probably has failed. Now if you're in the countryside with a full pantry and a stream next to you that might not matter too much. You'll sit this one out. But if you're in the middle of New York?
My first thought when this happens is society will get itself going again in a few weeks. I wouldn't want to be the looter who robbed a gas station in the trouble. By time it was obvious that society isn't getting back together the gas in their tanks is bad so I wouldn't want it. I'd be more interested in robbing the hardware store to get shovels, and other supplies for gardening so that I can live long term. Hopefully my neighbors are helping as well, division of labor is helpful.
This assumes I survive. Anyone who is this interested in destroying society is probably going to use other means as well to kill people at the same time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-food-trade-chokepoin...
It highlights the shipping "chokepoints" where disruption causes potential food crisis for where the ship had intended to deliver its payload. If the infrastructure which manages these pathways is attacked, the security of these regions is in jeopardy.
Incidentally, my impression has always been that, at least with the comparatively low-yield atomic weapons that have actually been used, it's not the instant obliteration that's the biggest problem, but rather the lingering effects of fallout and radiation sickness.
The problem with leveraging nukes is MAD. With worms, you can do a lot of damage without even knowing who did it. Think the Anthrax attacks in 2001 x 1000.
With worms, you can do a bunch of damage over a long period of time without getting discovered. What's the US going to do, start a nuclear war over it? No, see MAD above.
I mean if a worm could figure out how to stop shipping (say simultaneously disable control / start systems of vehicles or gas pumps), people will start to starve after a few days, then probably total chaos will happen leading to a bunch of deaths. That's just a single scenario.
How about if a worm took control of all the air traffic towers simultaneously and change the information so that controllers would start crashing planes everywhere.
I know nuclear war has been played out on tv and in movies for the last 70 years or so, but I don't see an all out nuclear war between two states lobbing hundreds of warheads at each other ever happening. At least not intentionally. Any type of nuclear detonation would either be accidental, or very isolated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Disconten...
Corollary: It is vital (no pun intended) that we learn to live in harmony with Nature or we will destroy ourselves.
I know hackers hate the word cyber because grandma uses it, but it's the right word for it. The stand-in "computer based" almost works, but it doesn't cover things like hacking radios.