Could North Korea Hack A Tesla? The Terrifying Truth About Netflixs Leave The World Behind
For anyone who remembers the government's "Protect and Save" leaflets from the 1980s, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden's latest advice will be familiar.
At the Porton Down Defense Laboratory, as Minister for Disaster Preparedness, the country's "Doomsday Czar" provides the latest information on how to survive Armageddon in the digital age.
It seems that hiding in a closet with stored nuts is no longer enough as recommended by "protection and survival" in the event of a nuclear attack. Dowden warns that the current apocalypse will likely be a cyberattack, which makes vintage radios important.
"The world has changed beyond recognition and our society relies heavily on digital infrastructure," he said. “This is the first time everyone has access to a battery powered FM radio How many people today have a means of communication that does not rely on digital and electricity?'
If Mr Dowden's warning isn't enough to add FM radio to your Christmas list, you might change your mind if you watch Netflix's new movie Leave the World Behind, about devastating cyber attacks. (Warning: Spoilers follow.)
Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as the Sandfords, a New York couple who take a 48-hour break from their phones and screens for an Airbnb vacation in rural Long Island. This rarely works as the evil cyber forces wreak havoc with more than just Wi-Fi.
First a giant oil tanker washed ashore in Sun Bay, its GPS navigation system malfunctioning. Then the cell phone network goes down and the signal goes to the fancy flat-screen TV. Meanwhile, news of a massive power outage spread in his hometown of New York. Or so they say: There's no way to get news without the Internet. Instead, the only information received was a vague analog message repeated over the television, declaring an unspecified "national emergency".
As America's Internet highway leads to a dead end filled with error messages and timer symbols, the real consequences are getting worse. Airline dives from the sky. Tesla's self-driving cars are racing and creating massive traffic jams. Worse, Sandford's teenage daughter, Rose, complained of feeling "terrible anxiety" because she couldn't watch '90s comedy show Friends on streaming. It reflects a safe, pre-digital age and is a sign that many members of Generation X are addicted to the web.
Director Sam Ismail's film is already number one on Netflix worldwide and has been compared to a cyber version of Threads, the 1983 BBC drama about a nuclear attack on England. It also features other apocalyptic scenes, such as a microwave weapon ripping out its prey's teeth and disrupting animal migration patterns, deer flying in the wrong direction, deer behaving strangely, and flamingos ending up in ponds. But how realistic is it? Such horrors only happen in Hollywood? Or could it really happen?
The answer, with some worrisome caveats, is largely "no," according to Jake Moore, a former police cybersecurity expert who worked for Europe's leading cybersecurity company, ESET. However, Dowden would be happy if Downing Street required a COBRA crisis response meeting.
“It's a beautifully made film and anything that makes people question their own cyber security is a huge plus, whether for personal or business use. Is such a scenario possible? Theoretically yes, but eliminating so many completely separate networks at the same time is almost impossible.'
You could say it's the premise of the movie, and that's how most people envision a massive cyber attack that wipes out the entire internet. However, this is based on the analog era assumption that the web itself is like a single computer with a "plug" that can be unplugged. In reality, it consists of several independent sites served by different countries, governments, cities and companies, all of which need to be moved at once.
"For example, Meta (Facebook) has data from seven different sites, so if something hits one of those sites, it won't hit all of them, and you're talking about a big private company," Moore said. It would be more effective to target companies with influence in many sectors that provide channels, news services, internet and mobile phone networks. But these services will have their own internal firewalls, and even if you take Sky, you'll have many other providers. You can take it."
Lisa Fort, founder of Red Goat Cyber Security, said the only way to disrupt a country's entire power grid is through electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs. During the initial tests of atomic bombs, scientists noticed that high-altitude explosions could disturb the Earth's magnetic field, knocking out street lights and fuse boxes some 1,000 kilometers away.
According to US government assessments, a large nuclear bomb detonation 150 miles from Kansas could knock out all electricity in America. But even though many major powers are quietly developing EMP weapons where they don't need crude explosives like nuclear weapons, no one believes these weapons are capable of destroying several square kilometers of infrastructure.
Another disturbing scene in the film is when the Sandford family tries to return home to New York, only to find a pile of thousands of crashed Teslas. Tesla's sat nav hack brings them all to the same place as they accelerate to top speed at the last minute (Sandford's car is nearly hit by some newbies on the road).
That raises lingering concerns about the pitfalls of self-driving cars: Although safety is paramount when marketing its products, Tesla isn't comfortable with the risks. Like many other tech companies, it offers so-called "bug bounties," rewards for any hacker who discovers a vehicle's cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
"Engineers generally like to point out things that are wrong, and they do it for reward or just because it's the right thing to do," says Matthew Haynes , a former British military officer who runs the cybersecurity firm Askari Blue. "Tesla also released most of its source code so people could find exploitable bugs."
He noted that Tesla cars will also have unknown security features, all of which will need to be hacked individually. But among cybersecurity professionals, according to industry norms, there is no "proof word."
A theoretical drawback of self-driving cars, for example, is "poisoning the data set" they use to recognize and obey road signs. Typically, such cars use machine learning, which generates millions of real-world images of 40 mph speed limit signs from every possible angle and under various weather and visibility conditions.
"If a hacker adds the same image of a 40 mph speed sign to, say, a green square sticker with instructions for the car to go 100 mph, they can randomly stick that sticker on another signal and wreak havoc," Haynes said. "But it also requires sophisticated hacking and hard physical work."
Fortunately, the rest of the film's plot seems to fall within the realm of science fiction. There is no way to reverse the direction of the Earth's magnetic field, which is believed to be used by migratory birds as a compass. And while sonic weapons exist to disperse crowds, none have the power to silence an area the size of Long Island like in the film.
No known weapon could knock out another man's teeth: the tragic fate of Sandford's teenage son Archie. In the film, this episode is linked to the "Havana Syndrome", which refers to the mysterious headaches and illnesses suffered by American diplomats at the Cuban embassy in 2016.
US researchers initially thought diplomats could be targeted by long-range microwave weapons, which create small, concentrated areas of pressure in brain tissue. But the credibility of the Havana syndrome has now been questioned, and a US intelligence analysis earlier this year concluded that there was "no credible evidence" that the enemy was involved.
However, Forte fears that developed countries such as the UK still have weaknesses in their national infrastructure and that "we can live with luck in a sense that has never happened before".
The most vulnerable, he said, are objects built in the 1990s, which use electronic technology from a more secure era, when no one expected a cyber attack from the state. "Things like modern train signals and some hospital systems, which can cause a lot of problems if hacked, often use industrial control systems from the 1990s that are inherently insecure," he said.
The warning came in 2017, when 60 NHS trusts around the world fell victim to the "WannaCry" ransomware attack, believed to have been carried out by North Korean hackers. This prevented hospitals from accessing patient records and forced some hospitals to divert ambulances to other facilities, even though no patients were injured.
The researchers then accused NHS managers of failing to update the security of key software. But whether these lessons are actually learned remains to be seen. Parliament's National Security Strategy Committee recently warned that the UK is at "high risk" of a catastrophic ransomware attack on government services, which could "bring the country to a standstill".
However, as Moore points out, hacking doesn't have to disrupt the entire digital infrastructure to endanger civilization. Instead, they can solve system bottlenecks like contactless payments, which can lead to long queues at ATMs and supermarkets. The lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to clashes between panicked shoppers, is what could be a taste of chaos. As one British MI5 leader put it, "We are only four meals away from achieving anarchy."
In fact, after the WannaCry attack, while Moore was still working for Dorset Police, he served on the steering committee to advise the county on how to deal with serious cyber attacks.
"The main objective is to protect things like food and water supplies, which are things that can quickly lead to civil unrest if they are not available," he said. "You also have to think about things like toilet paper."
True, a film about a global paper shortage might not have as dramatic a plot as Leave the World Behind. But it shows how even the most mundane aspects of everyday life can be exploited through well-targeted hacking.
So, in addition to the FM radio, consider a few extra rolls of Andrex for your doomsday emergency kit. Also a large stock of old school DVDs, possibly including a Friends box set. Then, hopefully, you'll survive the cybergeddon that affects everyone.
Expand your horizons with award-winning British journalists. Try The Telegraph free for one month, then enjoy a year for $9 with our exclusive US offer.
