Excellent. It’s possible to wirelessly hack into a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker and re-program it to shut down or deliver fatal jolts of electricity. Hat-tip to Memex 1.1.
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Dear United States Air Force (USAF): The Internet domain mildenhall.af.mil is an air force base in the UK. The domain mildenhall.com is a tourism website in Suffolk. Please send your classified documents to the first one, not the second.
A telephone conversation last night — once the caller had garbled my name and I’d said that it was me, and I’d asked who was calling:
Caller: I’m calling from [unintelligible] on behalf of Westpac Bank.
Me: Before we go any further, how do I know you’re calling on behalf of my bank?
Caller: Sorry? We’ve been given the database…
Me: Before I discuss any kind of personal or financial information, how do I know you’re legitimately calling on behalf of Westpac bank, as opposed to just some person claiming that?
Caller: [sounding confused] Well, I don’t know…
Me: Well, I guess I’ll be hanging up then. Goodbye.
Another point, of course, is why they thought I might want to discuss anything financial at 7.20pm after a long day — when most people are either unwinding or trying to have dinner.
Dear Westpac, if you have something to discuss, isn’t that my Business Banking Manager’s job? During business hours? I was really happy with the service you’ve given me so far this week — and now you’ve ruined it.
Following news a month ago that it’s easy to hack into nuclear reactors, news that another experimental attack caused a generator to self-destruct. The US government and the power industry fear what might happen if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale. Thanks to Jan Whitaker for the pointer.
Just so you can get a sound night’s sleep before a busy working week, here’s the news that it’s easy to hack into US nuclear power plants:
The first time Scott Lunsford offered to hack into a nuclear power station, he was told it would be impossible. There was no way, the plant’s owners claimed, that their critical components could be accessed from the Internet. Lunsford, a researcher for IBM’s Internet Security Systems, found otherwise.
“It turned out to be one of the easiest penetration tests I’d ever done,” he says. “By the first day, we had penetrated the network. Within a week, we were controlling a nuclear power plant. I thought, ‘Gosh. This is a big problem.’”
Yes, Scott, I reckon it is.
Of course Australia’s “critical infrastructure” wouldn’t have any problems like this, would it.
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