Imagine you are a financial advisor waking up glowing with confidence because you passed an SEC cybersecurity exam. Then you go to your car and find it won’t start. A hacker has taken control of your ignition system. He demands ransom before you can get going.
Sound far-fetched? Not as much as you might think.
Many household items are now computerized and connected to the web, and hackers are taking advantage of the “Internet of Things” to disrupt the everyday lives of consumers and organizations in exchange for payoffs.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the manufacturers of cars, toasters, TVs, etc. don’t have their guard up.
“These things are being built without security in mind,” said Bill Wright, head of Symantec’s Norton Cybersecurity Institute program. “It is much harder to bolt on security afterwards than to build it in at the beginning.”
Wright spoke at a Federal Trade Commission seminar Wednesday, warning attendees about the emerging threat of hackers to web-attached things from toys to laptops.
“Ransomware is the most profitable malware in history,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez at the gathering. Ransomware attacks quadrupled in the last year to over 4,000 per day, she said.
It’s the profitability driving the surge in ransomware, not technology.
With such software, hackers can get hundreds of dollars from individuals and up to $30,000 from corporations, which affords them money to hire highly skilled techies to write the computer code—and to hire them globally.
“We’re not dealing with hackers in a basement,” said Craig Williams, security outreach manager at Cisco.