The fact that cyber-kinetic attacks rarely appear on mainstream news doesn’t mean they don’t happen. They happen more frequently than you would think. Many, for various reasons, aren’t even reported to agencies charged with combatting them.
This hinders security experts in understanding the full scope and recognizing the trends in this growing problem. We’ll highlight examples of cyber-kinetic incidents and attacks in this chapter. Some were malfunctions that, nonetheless, demonstrated cyber-physical system vulnerabilities. Some were collateral damage from hacking or computer viruses. The vulnerabilities these exposed inspired a growing number of targeted cyber-kinetic attacks in recent years.
The Beginning of Cyber-Kinetic...
We live in a world in which the way we observe and control it is radically changing. Increasingly, we interact with physical objects through the filter of what computational systems embedded in them tell us, and we adjust them based on what those systems relate.
We do this on our phones, in our cars, in our homes, in our factories and, increasingly, in our cities. Physical objects are so interconnected that we simply take those connections for granted, as if being able to unlock your car by pushing a button on your key fob, unlocking it with your phone or...