8: an Internet of Stool Pigeons?
Either way, get ready to pay. After all, a system of devices that helpfully tracks your interests and activities can, with determination and often surprisingly little effort, be made to serve more nefarious interests as well. But the e-mailed nanny cam footage of you tells a different story, as does the voice mocking you over the baby monitor as you open the envelope of photos — snapshots of you taken all over town. It had cost you: New e-mail address, new phone, new locked-down social media accounts, boards you dare not post to anymore, even a few lost friends. If social media gave cyber-stalkers a duck blind from which to snipe, then the Internet of Things offers them all the comforts of a game preserve with a remote-activated hunting rifle. You thought you’d finally gotten rid of him.
They’ve then used your poorly secured WiFi to turn your home into a dead drop for drugs, guns and bomb-making materials. The more connected our devices become, and the more agency they have to perform transactions for us, the more likely we’ll stumble across other forgotten corpses tooling around town, perhaps, on a final tour before their self-driving cars run out of gas. Once, we lived in smaller, more close-knit communities. But today, as online shopping and automatic bill pay make it ever easier to live as a shut-in, more of us fall through the cracks. Don’t worry — it will be sorted out in a year or two. The apartment dweller’s demise was detected by her piled-up mail, but the homeowner had no such giveaways. She was a frequent traveler, so her mail was on hold, Bangkok Tower – bangkok.thaibounty.com – and no one expected to see her for a while.
The good news? Making that payment schedule is about to become the least of your worries. Sorting through them, you realize that Amazon’s anticipatory shipping system has been sending drones laden with pseudoephedrine cold medicine, lighter fluid, cold packs, lithium batteries and other meth-cooking paraphernalia. The bad news? Well, that’s what this article is about. You return from your two-week vacation to discover piles of delivery boxes clogging your front doorway. An Internet of Stool Pigeons? They’re still arguing jurisdiction as your head hits the hood. But this lame excuse for a “Breaking Bad” episode is the least of your problems, as you discover when an alphabet soup of federal agents storms in a moment later.
It’s already arrived in devices, sensors, controllers, big data tools and cloud infrastructure, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Tomorrow, an online world stretching from your kitchen blender to the factory floor to the satellites overhead will open security vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale and grant systemic malfunctions extraordinary — and terrifying — reach. Cisco chief futurist Dave Evans in an explanatory video. Well, the check’s just come due, metaphorically speaking, and you’re still making payments on that all-singing, all-dancing washer and dryer.
But, as history has shown, we have yet to master the art of protecting systems, in part because some level of openness is usually required for them to function, and in part because hackers are adept at finding indirect ways of attacking them. And while it can take months or years to identify, analyze and plug such security holes (or make them illegal), it takes only minutes to inflict substantial harm. Already, search engines like Shodan enable users to browse unsecured systems from baby monitors to traffic lights to medical devices.
The hackers sure did, and they’ve used them not only to spam you ads, but to find a backdoor into your wireless network and e-mail your friends and co-workers versions of the virus. They’ve also contacted all the devices your appliances talk to. You look around the crowded city restaurant, remembering a time when there was no better place for anonymity, no surer way to guarantee that your conversation was not overheard. Your eyes stray to the man across the room looking vaguely in your direction, wearing the latest Google Glass equivalent, and you are reminded of the sheer quantity of recording devices with which we surround ourselves every day. But then you think of the smart watch that is listening for your voice commands and the smart table that awaits your order and watches for your payment. Enjoy your house full of expensive bricks.
