Hijacked, Rampaging Infrastructure Will Kill Humans by 2025 – Gartner
21st July 2021
Rampaging cyber hoods will be using compromised machinery and systems to kill humans by 2025, according to cheerfully optimistic new predictions from research company Gartner.
The warning around what Gartner calls “operational technology (OT) environments” – which it described as “hardware and software that detects or causes a change, through the direct monitoring and/or control of industrial equipment, assets, processes and events”, so basically industry and infrastructure with moving parts – comes following an increase in assaults on such systems, frequently in connection to ransomware attacks or simple state-sponsored hooliganism.
While such attacks can be dangerous, any threat they currently pose is typically a secondary effect of the avarice of the perpetrators: a ransomware attacker shutting down a water company is not usually trying to cause customers of the affected company to die from dehydration, for example. They just want to inconvenience everyone enough for the company to pay up. There have been exceptions.
But Gartner then suggested that attempts to deliberately hurt humans will be the next logical step.
(Reminder that The Register, although a tech tabloid, is still a tabloid.)