Nobody Would have agreed to this

“The Internet will be pervasive global network, both wired and wireless, ubiquitously connecting all of us at all times to a massive grid of supercomputing power beyond our present capacity to even understand. We will carry with us at all times personal computing devices – they will be called tablets, laptops, mobile smartphones. Our residences and offices will have ‘smart home hubs,’ ‘smart speakers’ and ‘smart TVs’.  Our bodies will have wearable devices – watches, goggles and more – even embedded devices. When we go outside, cameras and sensors will watch us on every building and street corner – even from our neighbors’ doorbells! All of these devices will plug into this global network of centralized, supercomputing power so that every action we take and every word we speak will be surveilled, captured and fed into engines of artificial intelligence which continuously optimize their algorithms so that gigantic corporations can control and manipulate us. Governments – even in ‘democratic’ countries – will use this awesome matrix to spy on citizens, and authoritarian regimes will build the perfect tools for surveillance, repression and control. Every person born into this world will grow up having never experienced or even heard of the concept of privacy. Everyone will think this is normal.”

So today you always have to just trust the Privacy Policies and ability of Web platforms, application providers – and yes also VPN companies – and the people in them – to defend their platforms and infrastructure from outside and inside attacks. This is why – to cite just a few examples:

• a 2^nd class Massachusetts Air National Guardsman can open and share the Pentagon’s briefings on Ukraine’s War Plans;
• Amazon Ring employees can spy on its customers’ video feeds;
• Chinese spies can hack the master keys to Microsoft’s cloud kingdom;
• local police can intercept your voice and text messages – and routinely do;
• criminal hackers and adversarial governments likewise can do the same;
• ‘Data Brokers’ on the Internet can capture 90% of all Internet activity and resell to any and all comers.
• and the endless drumbeat of headlines you read about every day keep occurring.

What these examples all have in common are the three vulnerablities above.

• Things which are centralized are always run by people – so your security and privacy is only as good as their lowest paid engineer – or any disgruntled insider.
• Even when humans don’t fail, Internet Protocol ensures that there will be a back door waiting to be found.
• When attackers do get in – the data is lying around unencrypted, or the keys are right there up there with it on the Cloud.

It doesn’t matter whether your are a gigantic organizations with the best security architectures and processes in place, or an average individual Internet user:  the whole design of the system is stacked against you.   Sooner or later, if it is valuable enough, it will be compromised.

So Here We Are – and It’s Getting Even Worse

The result of all this is the world we live in today.

• Surveillance by governments, corporations and the industrial information complex is pervasive.
• No device, data, or digital asset of value is safe from criminals and hackers.
• Everything and anything of value on the Internet can and will be compromised.

And as bad as it now, just wait – it will get much worse thanks to two massive technology revolutions now washing over us.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is exponentially lowering the costs and increasing the scale and power of surveillance and malicious or criminal cyberattacks.  The bad guys used to only go after the big data lakes because – like banks  – that’s where the money was.   But when you can use AI driven automation and spoofing to:

• launch cyberattacks on thousands of users simultaneously; or
• deep fake phone calls to fraudlently transfer money from a specific target’s bank account;

that changes the equation.

Is AI also being used to thwart cyberattacks?  Of course.  But what history tells us is that the attackers are always 3 steps ahead, and so long as the fundamental vulnerabilities of the networking, communications and data in the Cloud are not addressed, they will remain so.

Internet of Things (Hint- this includes your Smart Home and Office)

The Internet of Things is rightly called a major driver of the 4^th Industrial Revolution.   The possibilities of connecting billions of people and machines, with access to unprecedented amounts of data, storage capacity and processing power are endless.   Amongst those are the possibilities for ransomware gangs, nation state actors and others to move on to hacking:

your Smart Car – while you are in it;

• your smart, connected pacemaker and insulin pumps;
• your Smart Home thermostat; and
• whatever else we dream up to embed into our homes, offices, lives and bodies.

What could go wrong?!    We will find out soon enough:

• SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers recorded 112.3 million attacks in 2022, an 87% year-over-year increase. Much of this spike was centered in North America, where attacks rose 145%, and the U.S., which saw volumes rise 169%.