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Hot fridges, a fake nuclear alert and a $6bn heist: are we in the foothills of a hacking epidemic? (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 17 hours ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 12 hours ago (8 children)

I mean, it's kinda obvious. But it's also not a bad thing. No secure system will be affected, because secure systems are designed to be impossible to fail.

Lots of "secure" systems designed by hacks that took money selling half-cocked nonsense to dumb people will fail, and it'll probably be revealed there's trillions of dollars of investment by these dumb people into insecure systems that should outrage everyone.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

    There are literally thousands of water infrastructure facilities that are on Shodan now. I take your meaning, but it's a very bad thing.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

    Exactly my point. Corruption, stupidity, and complacency allowed that to happen despite experts warning for years it was a terrible idea. This isn't some new threat, the only 'new' part of it is democratization of otherwise arcane knowledge. This is like getting mad that a thermite recipe is being passed around. Yeah, some people will do bad things with it, but generally anything that needs to be secure should be built to be secure against it.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    That's not exactly accurate. The problem is that everything in infrastructure was working just fine, and so they figured they could make it more efficient by reducing the staff. And to do that, they put everything online, so it was controllable by fewer people. And they kept doing that year after year. The funding went down and down and down, and there are literal, uh, literal policies that keep them from switching to better stuff. So it's much more complex than the way you draw it.

    For example, US water infrastructure would need $2.1 trillion or something around that amount to actually become current and fully repaired.

    Where exactly would that come from? It's not an easy answer. It's a much more complex problem. That's all I'm saying.

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  • [–] -1 points 9 hours ago

    Where exactly would that come from?

    Well we could start by nationalizing water services so the inefficiencies that are inherent to monopolistic capitalist entities could be eliminated, drastically reducing costs. And we could pay for it over time with some sort of fee... one that might target those that have hoarded over 98% of all wealth produced over the last 50 years which should have gone into infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. We might even, if we're really clever, directly seize the wealth of the companies that sold these solutions to these water companies given they've compromised national security and public health.

    That all would drastically reduce the inflated $2.1 Trillion number which isn't the actual cost, it is the price for private contractors to do it for the government, to something you could reasonably pay for with the wealth already accumulated or that could be accumulated by actually fairly taxing those that have actively harmed society.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

    But it's also not a bad thing

    Say that to the folks with implanted medical devices

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  • [–] 0 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    Implanted medical devices require pretty much skin to skin contact to adjust, the few that do use bluetooth to adjust settings. But yes, it is terrible that we use wireless technology in medical implants. We should, you know, sue the companies that made them knowing they were using naturally vulnerable technology to make them.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago

    the few that do use bluetooth to adjust settings.

    That may be the intended use, but it does not imply the system is secure.

    Here's an example of an insulin pump vulnerability from a few years ago that enabled attacks from up to six meters away. Think about how many potentially-compromised devices you're ever within six meters of. The vulnerability enabled remote control over the insulin pump, which IIUC can be deadly.

    https://www.aha.org/h-isac-reports/2021-11-29-h-isac-tlp-white-vulnerability-report-researchers-identify-high-severity

    My point being — it's not a good thing to be in the midst of a hacking epidemic! Real people will be harmed as a result of increased hacking.

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