In the last decade a vast number of the critical computer-controlled systems that human life depends upon have been connected to the Internet with software riddled with millions of bugs and security defects.
The result? Power grids, hospitals, oil & gas pipelines, water treatment plants, traffic lights, cars, trucks, and trains are at the mercy of hackers, rogue states, terrorists and other bad actors. With relative ease, they can exploit these defects to disable, destroy, or commandeer our essential systems. It is an existential threat to humanity as great as climate change and as apocalyptic as nuclear Armageddon. The threat is charted in the meticulously researched and award-winning books This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth and Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier.
The Iron Law of Security says that an insecure system can never be made secure no matter how much time or money you throw at it. That law forces a terrifying and hugely inconvenient truth upon humanity. Much of the software currently running our world can never be made secure.
Human communities cannot survive without critical infrastructure. If it breaks down or is held to ransom, food can’t be transported to supermarkets, or electricity and water supplied to houses and offices. Within weeks families would huddle together in the cold and dark, deprived of food and clean water.
Humanity is startlingly vulnerable as long as hackers can disable, destroy, or commandeer our critical infrastructure by exploiting the millions of bugs and security defects in the software that runs the world. This is not an acceptable situation for us to be in.