Over the course of just a few weeks, a series of cyber security incidents has brought home how fragile our connected world is. In one of the biggest thefts in history, hackers attributed by the FBI to North Korea siphoned more than $6bn worth of cryptocurrency and other digital assets out of Binance, a platform for blockchain finance. Bizarre hijacks of internet-connected commercial refrigerators have also taken place. Supermarkets in several European countries reported attempts, some successful, to remotely raise temperatures of fridges and freezers, and some cold storage facilities of France's national blood service were also affected.
This month, many websites also had to go offline to patch two vulnerabilities that artificial intelligence had uncovered in the ubiquitous software code known as PHP. Last week, a cyber attack drained about €100mn from an internal account of French lender Crédit Mutuel Arkéa. Who is responsible for many of these incidents is not yet clear, but they share common lessons for governments, businesses and individuals.
The digitisation and connectedness of money, information and physical infrastructure has taken place with astonishing speed, and the gains in convenience, optimisation and cost savings have come at the price of increased vulnerabilities. Decentralisation does not by itself solve this. Binance was a centralised node much like a conventional bank, and investigators found hackers had penetrated broader parts of its internal network. The Internet of Things allowed supermarket chains to optimise cooling centrally, but malign actors could not previously hijack refrigerators so easily from afar. With PHP, many websites relied on the same software, which AI has made less secure for everyone.
AI is also fast making these risks worse. Large language models have proved excellent at spotting bugs unnoticed by human programmers, and are increasingly used to impersonate humans and fool people into lowering their guard. Minimising human error is part of the solution, through public education, liability rules and standards, but every user and business must also take essential precautions. In the most critical cases, "airgapping" or limiting connectivity may be necessary, because the gain of being connected is not worth the risk. A fully connected world was a beautiful dream, but it may have been too good to be true.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing