Tuesday 21 July 2015

When a hack could kill

Could a hack cause loss of human life?

A successful cyberattack is likely or extremely likely to take down critical infrastructure such as transportation or energy systems and cause deaths over the next three years, according to almost half (48%) of the 625 security professionals surveyed by Intel Security and the Aspen Institute. The survey defines critical infrastructure as the finance, energy, transportation and government sectors and interviewed public and private organizations in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.

While hacks are known for disrupting businesses like Sony Entertainment Pictures SNE, -0.04% and causing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of financial damage, like in the case of Target Corp.’s TGT, -0.54% breach, the repercussions could be worse: 18% of IT professionals in the U.S. find the scenario of physical harm “extremely likely,” sharing that view with 10% of French respondents.
Critical infrastructure organizations are continual hack targets but no publicly apparent, massive outage — like a mass power failure, which could shut down medical equipment, or tampering with transit systems to induce a crash — has taken place yet, according to the report.

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