A connected world will be a playground for hackers
Few companies making connected gadgets have much experience with cyber security
AS WAYS TO break into casinos go, a fish tank is an unusual route. Yet that is what was used in an unnamed American gambling house in 2017. It had invested in a fancy internet-connected tank in which the temperature and salinity of the water were remotely controlled. Its owners were not naive: when they installed it, they isolated its controls on their own specific part of their company network, away from all their sensitive systems.
It made no difference. According to Darktrace, a computer-security firm, attackers from Finland managed to break into the tank’s systems, then used it as a stepping stone for the rest of the casino’s networks. They made off with around 10GB of data.
This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline “Hack the planet”
From the September 14th 2019 edition
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