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Smart TVs, satellites, and billboards all hacked in Ukrainian war

Andrew Jones 2

I've been arguing for the last few years - the chances are - we are beyond Nuclear weapons now. The next World War will be fought online. Because of our reliance on Technology - targeting the banking network and the communications networks will bring a civilised country to it's knees. If the ATMs don't work and the ePOS card readers don't work, you are left relying on physical cash - and I doubt I'm the only one who only has a small amount of physical cash handy, relying on the bit of plastic far more than perhaps I should. Largely as a civilised society we overlook all the technology that works - while it is working, we only notice how complicated and interconnected things are when they stop working. We don't care how the channel list on the Sky box stays up-to-date as long as it does, but if someone wanted to hack the Astra 2E/F/whatever-letter-it-has-now satellite to add a channel - or remove every channel except the propaganda channel, that's do-able. If someone wanted to instruct the Sky boxes to delete all recorded programmes - that's do-able. The chances are because a satellite is involved - moving the chances of an attack out of the range of more typical script kiddies - security is probably not the most sophisticated. The banking network obviously would be a more difficult target, but DDoS would probably be possible. I don't profess to know enough about the infrastructure of the mobile network(s) to understand how feasible an attack against the infrastructure is, but hypothetically speaking - I'd imagine it would be safe to assume that any system that is open to being managed remotely, is also possible to exploit.

It might all be hypothetical right now, it may even not be possible right now, but I think someone somewhere should note that eventually - it will happen, and it's probably a good time to think about how to defend an attack against the system.

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