It’s been 15 years since 9/11. Terrorism has evolved and so have their techniques.
Cyber security has become one of the greatest threats of all time. Jim Heppelmann, CEO of PTC, once said “It [IoT] is basically a new type of terrorism.” By 2020, the 50-billion internet connected devices can also be seen as 50 billion potential problems for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
As the saying goes, “Same knife cuts bread and fingers.”
In the wake of the recent terrorist attack in Nice, a U.S. Assistant Attorney General for National Security, John P. Carlin, pointed out, “If we don’t think about how terrorists could exploit that [trucks running in an automated fashion] at the front-end, and not after they take a truck and run it through a crowd of civilians, we’ll regret it.” He is right. Computer researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to take control of a Jeep traveling at 70mph, even when the driver is inside the vehicle, and there’re still hundreds of thousands of similar exploitable vulnerabilities out there on different devices.
“In our division, we’ve just started a group looking at nothing but Internet of Things,” said Carlin.
References
Patrick Tucker, “How Will Terrorists Use the Internet of Things? The Justice Department Is Trying to Figure That Out,” Defense One, September 8, 2016.