PDF Version Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It eBook

MARC GOODMAN has spent a career in law enforcement and technology.?He has served as a street police officer, senior adviser to?Interpol and futurist-in-residence with the FBI.?As the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and the Chair for Policy, Law, and Ethics at Silicon Valley?s Singularity University, he continues to investigate the intriguing and often terrifying intersection of science and security, uncovering nascent threats and combating the darker sides of technology

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CHAPTER 1

Connected, Dependent and Vulnerable

Technology?is a queer thing; it brings you great gifts with one hand and it stabs you in the back with the other.
— CHARLES PERCY SNOW

Mat Honan?s life looked pretty good on-screen: in one tab of his browser were pictures of his new baby girl; in another streamed the
tweets from his thousands of Twitter followers. As a reporter for?Wired?magazine in San Francisco, he was living an urbane and connected life and was as up-to-date on technology as anyone. Still, he had no idea his entire digital world could be erased in just a few keystrokes. Then, one August day, it was. His photographs, e-mails, and much more all fell into the hands of a hacker. Stolen in just minutes by a teenager halfway around the world. Honan was an easy target. We all are.
Honan recalls the afternoon when everything fell apart. He was play- ing on the floor with his infant daughter when suddenly his iPhone pow- ered down. Perhaps the battery had died. He was expecting an important call, so he plugged the phone into the outlet and rebooted. Rather than the usual start-up screen and apps, he saw a large white Apple logo and a mul- tilingual welcome screen inviting him to set up his new phone. How odd.
Honan wasn?t especially worried: he backed up his iPhone every night. His next step was perfectly obvious?log in to iCloud and restore the phone and its data. Upon logging in to his Apple account, he was informed that his password, the one he was sure was correct, had been deemed wrong by the iCloud gods. Honan, an astute reporter for the world?s preeminent
technology magazine, had yet another trick up his sleeve. He would merely connect the iPhone to his laptop and restore his data from the hard drive on his local computer. What happened next made his heart sink.
As Honan powered up his Mac, he was greeted with a message from Apple?s calendar program advising him his Gmail password was incor- rect. Immediately thereafter, the face of his laptop?its beautiful screen? turned ashen gray and quit, as if it had died. The only thing visible on the screen was a prompt: please enter your four-digit password. Honan knew he had never set a password.
Honan ultimately learned that a hacker had gained access to his iCloud account, then used Apple?s handy ?find my phone? feature to locate all of the electronic devices in Honan?s world. One by one, they were nuked. The hacker issued the ?remote wipe? command, thereby erasing all of the data Honan had spent a lifetime accumulating. The first to fall was his iPhone, then his iPad. Last, but certainly not least, was his MacBook. In an instant, all of his data, including every baby picture he had taken during his daugh- ter?s first year of life, were destroyed. Gone too were the priceless photo- graphic memories of his relatives who had long since died, vanquished into the ether by parties unknown.
Next to be obliterated was Honan?s Google account. In the blink of an eye, the eight years of carefully curated Gmail messages were lost. Work conversations, notes, reminders, and memories wiped away with a click of a mouse. Finally, the hacker turned his intention to his ultimate target: Honan?s Twitter handle, @Mat. Not only was the account taken over, but the attacker used it to send racist and homophobic rants in Honan?s name to his thousands of followers.
In the aftermath of the online onslaught, Honan used his skills as an investigative reporter to piece together what had happened. He phoned Apple tech support in an effort to reclaim his iCloud account. After more than ninety minutes on the phone, Honan learned that ?he? had just called thirty minutes prior to request his password be reset. As it turns out, the only information anybody needed to change Honan?s password was his billing address and the last four digits of his credit card number. Honan?s address was readily available on the Whois Internet domain record he had created when he built his personal Web site. Even if it hadn?t been, dozens of online services such as WhitePages.com and Spokeo would have pro- vided it for free.
To ascertain the last four digits of Honan?s credit card, the hacker guessed that Honan (like most of us) had an account on Amazon.com. He was correct. Armed with Honan?s full name and his e-mail and mailing addresses, the culprit contacted Amazon and successfully manipulated a customer service rep so as to gain access to the required last four credit card digits. Those simple steps and nothing more turned Honan?s life upside down. Although it didn?t happen in this case, the hacker could have?just as easily used the very same information to access and pilfer Honan?s online bank and brokerage accounts.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Irrational Optimist: How I Got This Way 1

Part 1 A Gathering Storm

Chapter 1 Connected, Dependent, and Vulnerable 7

Chapter 2 System Crash 20

Chapter 3 Moore’s Outlaws 36

Chapter 4 You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product 44

Chapter 5 The Surveillance Economy 65

Chapter 6 Big Data, Big Risk 81

Chapter 7 I.T. Phones Home 105

Chapter 8 In Screen We Trust 124

Chapter 9 Mo’ Screens, Mo’ Problems 144

Part 2 The Future of Crime

Chapter 10 Crime, Inc. 171

Chapter 11 Inside the Digital Underground 194

Chapter 12 When All Things Are Hackable 222

Chapter 13 Home Hacked Home 239

Chapter 14 Hacking You 261

Chapter 15 Rise of the Machines: When Cyber Crime Goes 3-D 289

Chapter 16 Next-Generation Security Threats: Why Cyber Was Only the Beginning 317

Part 3 Surviving Progress

Chapter 17 Surviving Progress 351

Chapter 18 The Way Forward 373

Appendix: Everything’s Connected, Everyone’s Vulnerable: Here’s What You Can Do About It i

Acknowledgments v

Notes vii

Index xlvi