The End of Life as We Know It by Michael Guillen

Author:Michael Guillen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: this book is about the future
Publisher: Salem Books
Published: 2018-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING

At this point, you might be thinking: Who needs secret police, when so many IoT devices are spying and snitching on us? And doing so lawfully. With our blessing.

“You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else’s mail is a felony,” quips author and blogger Elizabeth Ann Bucchianeri, “but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.”695

If you’re wondering how much information about your internet behavior is being noticed, here’s an easy experiment you can do.

If you have a Google account—and who doesn’t these days?—log into https://myactivity.google.com/ and behold all the information that is stored about your online activity. It includes topics you’ve searched, websites you’ve visited, and videos you’ve watched.

And that’s just Google, which is relatively transparent about the lowdown they have on us. Think of all the IoT gadgets with which we interact daily, each one stashing away juicy tidbits of highly personal information about us for other people to see—total strangers halfway around the world, even.

For children now being born, their electronic dossiers begin right away. Hospitals digitize medical records and exchange them online. And schools expect kids to use electronic tablets for notetaking and the web for research.

Gennie Gebhart, a researcher at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, warns that today’s surveillance culture “threatens to normalize the next generation to a digital world in which users hand over data without question in return for free services, a world that is less private not just by default, but by design.”696

It’s a world run by what experts are calling the Internet of Everything, or IoE. A world that jeopardizes not just our personal privacy, but our civilization’s very existence.

On October 21, 2016, we got an unsettling peek at this dubious IoE world, when web service came to a screeching halt throughout North America and Europe. Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, The New York Times, Pinterest, PayPal, and other major websites went completely dark.

The culprit? Mirai, a nasty bit of malware that infects IoT devices. On that eye-opening October day, hundreds of thousands of Mirai-infected security cameras, routers, and DVRs helped spread their contagious disease throughout the world wide web at the speed of light.697

In 2017, in a report ominously headlined, “A New IoT Botnet Storm is Coming,” Check Point—a major Northern California cybersecurity company—issued a warning about a vicious new malware named IOTroop. The report’s three subheads read:

• A massive Botnet [IOTroop] is forming to create a cyber-storm that could take down the internet.

• An estimated million organizations have already been infected.

• The Botnet is recruiting IoT devices such as IP Wireless Cameras to carry out the attack.

According to the report, IOTroop is “evolving and recruiting IoT devices at a far greater pace and with more potential damage than the Mirai botnet of 2016.” It appears to be exploiting “vulnerabilities in Wireless IP Camera devices such as GoAhead, D-Link, TP-Link, AVTECH, NETGEAR, MikroTik, Linksys, Synology and others.”698

Welcome to the beginnings of the IoE world.

Way back in 2008, a cheery IBM predicted the IoE

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