Europol warns of online murder by 2015

08 Oct 2014

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In a chilling reminder of the undesirable consequences of technological progress, European authorities have warned that the first online murder could happen before the end of the year, Mobile Tor reported.

Sounding a loud alarm, the European policing agency has sent a warning to governments around the world  unprepared for what cyber criminals could do by exploiting internet technologies to kill their victims.

According to commentators, Europol's dire predictions were not entirely hical impossible considering that ethical hacker Barnaby Jac, had managed to hack into medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps in order to demonstrate how they could be controlled by a hacker.

The legendary programmer and computer security expert, in an unfortunate turn of events, passed away a week before he was to present a demo on hacking heart implants at the Black Hat 2013 conference.

Experts meanwhile are worried about injury, and possible deaths that could be caused by attacks on critical safety equipment. Dick Cheney who earlier served as US vice president, revealed that the wireless function on his implanted defibrillator had been disabled due to similar fears. The problem was that police forensic techniques were still lagging.

The 'Internet of Everything' included hospital health systems, vehicles, smart homes, cars, traffic control rooms and more were susceptible to 'hack attacks.'

Commentators point out that it was not that governments were doing nothing about this looming danger though. US health officials had ordered hospitals to enhance security after issues were detected with about 300 medical devices after reports about malware having slowed down monitors employed for high-risk pregnancies. More worryingly there was a blooming quasi-underground market for buying and selling vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, experts had warned that governments were ill-prepared to combat an increase in 'injury and possible deaths' caused by computer attacks on critical safety equipment Mail Online reported.

According to Rod Rasmussen, the president of US security firm IID, there already was this huge quasi-underground market where one could buy and sell vulnerabilities that had been discovered. 

He said, while the first reported murder was yet to happen, 'death by internet' was a reality already from online extortion and blackmail that had led to suicide.

If his firm's prediction of an online murder did not occur by the end of 2014, according to Rasmussen it was bound to happen within the next few years.

'The IoE [Internet of Everything] represents a whole new attack vector that we believe criminals will already be looking for ways to exploit,' the Europol threat assessment stated.

'The IoE is inevitable. We must expect a rapidly growing number of devices to be rendered 'smart' and thence to become interconnected.

'Unfortunately, we feel that it is equally inevitable that many of these devices will leave vulnerabilities via which access to networks can be gained by criminals.'

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