alt Hacker NewsCyberattack halts construction of tunnel between Denmark and Germany
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AI will exponentially increase the number of cyberattacks. The likely outcome is
1. Legacy firmware will be a bloodbath, leading to a consolidation of firms
2. All digital infrastructure will have an always on AI "shield" of agents that monitor and defend against attacks
3. The attacks that survive will depend on human points of failure, leading to less control for humans being the default
Karpathy yesterday posted [1] about the gap between small % of population getting high leverage from AI, and the rest of the world. We have a much more urgent gap between software powering the "physical world", and the digital natives. The digital natives now have 10x leverage with AI, with the ability to rapidly find and deploy exploits. We're now seeing a lot of this - fridges defrosting, access cards for construction workers not working. Next is train and air traffic controls, bank transactions/clearing wiped out, shipping being dismantled and so on. The gap is now being fully exposed.
The internet became a single point of failure for all of civilization years ago and we're only realizing it now.
We have to assume this the new normal- that APT has moved into an even more advanced, persistent and threatening. And that anybody who has not vigorously secured their infrastrcuture, continuously testing it, and adapting to ongoing threads, will continue to get hosed.
I think air gapping will be a necessity soon.
btw, Fehmarnbelt tunnel is one of Europe's biggest infrastructure project now. It's longer than Øresund tunnel/bridge (between Copenhagen and Malmø).
This reminds me I need to get to work storing a weeks worth of water in my basement and stashing a little bit of cash in the house.
This is going to be another "OMG AI is going to cause all these cyberattacks!11!!1!" thing that turns out to be "any child can find these on Shodan and the hardcoded can't-be-disabled Gott-tier login is admin/admin, isn't it?
It is, isn't it?
Again.
The Russia-Ukraine war has all signs to lead the world into world war 3 if its not stopped. All these sabotage acts will continue across the globe to drag more countries into the mix. What is the UN Security council doing?. Nobody hears their efforts to stop anything
It looks like this wave of cyberattacks happened hours after the attack to Russian datacenters. Am I right?
There was a cyberattack in France with 350-400 supermarkets having its fridges heated to 50C, instantly defrosting and spoiling food.
When your fridges hit 50C, that’s not a bug... thats a hotfix
Assuming the Russia speculation is correct, what is their motivation? General chaos in Europe? It seems pretty reckless knowing this would be ascribed to them, and I don't see how they benefit here.
It is like reading The Onion:
[x] Outsourcing identification to Internet companies (likely US).
[x] Outsourcing operational state of equipment to Internet companies (likely US).
[x] Displacing German and Danish workers with cheaper Poles.
[x] Cyber council member floats hybrid war rather than addressing its own incompetence.
[x] News comes from Kiev instead of Copenhagen.
well, shit.
Big picture, where this leads is a lot of physical stuff just getting unplugged from the Internet.
It's very easy to see how this goes — one side of the ledger is the cost savings you get from remote monitoring, remote control, automated cloud backups of access logs from employee badges, or whatever dumb reason this system was internet-connected in the first place.
On the other side of the ledger is the potential cost and probability of a shutdown from a cyberattack, whether that's from a belligerent state actor, a malfunctioning or maliciously deployed AI agent swarm, weird accelerationist hackers, or whatever, plus the cost of constantly defending and hardening systems against attack.
Chances are, the cost/benefit analysis will heavily favor just unplugging the thing from the Internet.