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Geography | Design & Technology | Citizenship | Computing

How hackers could hold the world to ransom

Is the internet a weapon of mass destruction? The announcement yesterday of a cyber attack on a major American pipeline has highlighted the vulnerability of our super-connected world.   There was consternationA feeling of shock or confusion. It derives from a Latin verb meaning to alarm or dismay. at the HQ of the giant US energy company. First, there had been mysterious disruptions on its key pipeline; now the reason seemed all too clear: its corporate computer systems had been hit by a ransomware attack. Unless Colonial paid a huge sum of money, said the hackers, they would wreak havoc on its operations. The company decided it must close the pipeline down. In terms of national infrastructureThe basic systems and services that a country needs to keep it going., the Colonial Pipeline was a major target. Running for 5,500 miles, it carries petrol and jet fuel from Houston, Texas to New York's harbour and major airports. With a capacity of 2.5 million barrels a day, it accounts for 45% of fuel supplies to America's East Coast. How much damage the hackers could do remains unclear. Experts believe that they managed to penetrate Colonial's administrative system, affecting such things as emails and invoices. But this should be entirely separate from the system controlling the pipeline, so the decision to shut it down was surprising. Colonial will not say whether it is planning to pay a ransom. The US government is treating the incident as a matter of grave concern, and is expected to introduce measures shortly to improve national infrastructure security. Ageing systems which have been connected to the internet without proper precautions are a particular cause for anxiety. A nightmare scenarioAn imaginary situation. The word was originally Italian and referred to the plot of a stage drama. would include hackers paralysing cities by disrupting electricity and water supplies and sending traffic lights haywire. Worse still, they could start a war by gaining control of weapons systems. But some people think governments have only themselves to blame. A new book by Nicole Perlroth called This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race explains why. The core of the book is an investigation into "zero-days". These are flaws in computer software or hardware for which there is non patch, and which can be exploited by hackers to infiltrate a system. The name reflects the fact that once the weakness is discovered, the computer company responsible has no time at all to come up with a defence. Instead of simply trying to solve the problem, Perlroth says, governments came to see the flaws as weapons to use against their enemies. Rather than crack down on the hackers, they paid them to find zero-days that could be exploited. Some of these are valued at millions of dollars. By 2013, America's National Security Agency had acquired "a vast library of invisible backdoors" into almost every major app, smartphone, laptop, social-media platform and antivirus defence. But disastrously, in 2017, a group of hackers broke into the library and stole the contents. The following month, North Korean hackers used these zero-days to demand ransoms from a host of targets including US electric companies, British hospitals, Russian banks and the Japanese police. The cost is estimated at almost $10bn. Is the internet a weapon of mass destruction? WWW equals WMD? Some say, no: it is part of the tapestry of life, like food or water or air. There are even movements to make access to it a fundamental human right. It has enabled unimaginable progress in all kinds of fields, from medicine to astronomy. Vital infrastructure is generally well protected: the Colonial Pipeline case has made headlines precisely because it is so rare. Others point out that, unlike natural resources, the internet is dominated by a few giant companies, poses direct competition to human intelligence and is vulnerable to takeover by hostile forces. We have become so dependent on it that there is no limit to the damage hackers could do - including poisoning a city's water supply or launching a nuclear war. KeywordsConsternation - A feeling of shock or confusion. It derives from a Latin verb meaning to alarm or dismay.

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