Roy Rogers and Dale Evans courtesy of google.com
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been adapting to a new computer. Some mischief-makers attacked my old one. The new machine has a hard drive the size of a pack of playing cards, and it’s faster, too The bad news is, I never entirely committed all my passwords to paper, so I’m having to invent new ones and making a permanent record. Tedious stuff by my reckoning.
A clerk at my bank suggested I consider using voice recognition instead of passwords. “What a wonderful idea,” I thought. But I didn’t sign up as I hadn’t the time. Lucky me. After further reading, I’ve discovered those who hack for fun and terror have cracked that technology. They pull a person’s words from places like YouTube to synthesize the voice. The technique is called training transfer. From start to finish, the duplicating process takes 10 minutes.
At the 2018 Black Hat conference, techies learned more scary stuff about what hackers are up to. Apparently, nothing electronic is safe. Satellites are hackable , for example. What’s more, their antennas can be weaponized and trained to destroy others of their kind. Compared to that, messing with voting machines is a piece of cake. By now, of course, everyone knows smart phones are vulnerable.
What’s most scary is that security systems we use to thwart hackers can turned to the dark side, as well. Two Kaspersky researchers ran several filters for their company and came up with tons of data meant to be super secure. Even guidance systems on airplanes are under constant attack. Think about that as you fly over Moscow.
Ironically, people are safest in a self-driving car. The automobile industry has done its homework. Given their potential liability, it’s not surprising. I don’t need to be convinced, however. I’d trust a bot over my night vision, anytime.
I’ll end with a sign-off from simpler days. “Happy Trails.” That’s the song Dale Evans and Roy Rogers used to sing at the close of their 1960’s television program. This is 2018, however. When you ride the internet today, remember you’ll be leaving behind plenty of trails.
Image: google.com
