… didn’t affect me personally. Certainly this blog is so minute that hardly anyone reads it. I didn’t notice any impact on any of the sites I used yesterday.
… that is, personally, not yet.
CNN/Money has a report this morning on the instrumentality of the attack:
Security firm Flashpoint said it believes that digital video recorders and webcams in people’s homes were taken over by malware and then, without owners’ knowledge, used to help execute the massive cyberattack.
Hundreds of thousands of devices appear to have have been infected with the malware.
It was a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack. Using the malware, hackers were able to flood a website with so much traffic that it impaired normal service.
We don’t have a webcam, but we do own and use a TIVO. so I now wonder if I was part of that instrumentality.
But you know what? It seems to me that, in the future, I will be part of the instrumentality. Involuntarily, but still will be stained with some of the guilt, because I will have provided the equipment, however unwillingly for an attack that compromises, at best, the livelihood of some people; at worst, people might die if an attack on a critical piece of physical infrastructure is successful.
Prototype of the Internet of Things. Image collected by the author in Faith, South Dakota, ca. 2012. Last seen headed east.
Do you know why I think this is nearly inevitable?
The predicted Internet of Things.
As we build this network creature, as it were, built of computers and refrigerators and DVRs and cars, we’re building a creature which is already cancerous, a servant that may knife us in the back at some point – or disappear without warning, without permission, at critical moments.
I face the future with a certain prickling along the base of the neck –
