JOIN USComing soon: Cyber-biowarfare, or should it be Bio-cyberwarfare
If you are a true believer in all things digital, chances are that you have been affected by a digital disease of one form or another. Some of these diseases are benign, others not so. Some can prove lethal to your digital system and your physical wellbeing.
Things get even more interesting if you supplement the digital diseases with diseases that are biological in nature, such as Covid-19. The technology is there, if you are willing to experiment. Human beings are a curious bunch, don’t you think?
The newest disease in the IT marketplace can strike users and non-users alike, and it is a pandemic on the horizon. Just like fake news in real-time. More on this later in the article.
The origins of most digital diseases can be attributed to malware, an umbrella term loosely applied to a collection of programmes variously described as worms, viruses, adware, spyware and ransomware.
Computer worms are benign, independently operating computer programmes that can replicate themselves. They are not destructive, but their metastasizing cancerous nature does slow down the computer. There is no known cure for computer worms other than shutting down the network and starting over.
Viruses, on the other hand, can replicate themselves and damage files on the computer they attack. However, they do require a host programme for their survival and are easily spread by attachments in e-mail messages. Spywares are standalone programmes that come attached with freeware such as browsers. They track users’ browsing habits and steal personal details such as passwords and credit card data for transmittal to a remote user. Adware is benign in that it is more of a nuisance, since no harm is done to either the computer or the software. The goal of these programmes is nothing more than aggressive product promotion through the display of advertisements on computer screens. As for inoculations against these diseases, using the most current anti-virus software from reputable sources does the trick.
The newer diseases have to do with ransomware, real-time fake news, and micro drones. Ransomware is used to encrypt user files and prevent the user from using their computer until a ransom is paid to decrypt the files. There is no cure other than to pay the ransom, as some municipalities and hospitals have done when their systems were infected. A woman in Germany died when doctors were unable to access her ransomware-encrypted medical records.
With the easy availability of free software to manipulate audio, video and text files, digital media as sources of information have been severely compromised. The adages ‘Seeing is believing’ and ‘I heard it from the horse’s mouth’ no longer apply. Other than staying off the web, especially Facebook and WhatsApp, there is no cure for succumbing to fake news.
Before discussing micro drones, two episodes from the latter half of the 20th century are worth recounting.
An umbrella is supposed to protect you from the rain and the sun. A Bulgarian Umbrella, on the other hand, is a weapon since the umbrella tip is designed to inject a small poisonous pellet containing ricin. Such an umbrella was used to assassinate Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in London in 1978.
Willy Burgdorfer, the discoverer of the Lyme disease pathogen and a biological weapons researcher for the US military was given the task of breeding ticks (which cause Lyme disease), mosquitoes and other insects, and infecting them with disease-causing pathogens. In her recent book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, Kris Newby states that the US experimented with infecting ticks and other insects with pathogens for possible use as a biological weapon during the 1950-1975 time period and that the Lyme epidemic of the 1960s was a military experiment gone wrong. According to Newby, there were programmes to drop “weaponised” ticks and other bugs from the air, and that uninfected bugs were released in residential areas in the US to trace how they spread.
Soon, the newest digital diseases on the planet could be transmitted by tiny drones resembling one of any number of insects -- bees, mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, cockroaches, even fruit flies. These remotely controlled robotic insects come equipped with recording devices (camera, microphone) and stingers. These stingers are designed to inject toxins, implant radio frequency identification devices or extract blood for biometric identification purposes. Perhaps even inject viruses. The newest avatar of cyberwarfare.
I assume you are currently at home under lockdown, streaming endless movies to pass the time. May I suggest you watch “Hated in the nation”, one of the episodes in season three of Black Mirror on Netflix. Entertaining? Yes. Educational and scary? You decide.
The proverbial fly on the wall may not be a fly after all; it could very well be a ‘micro aerial vehicle’, a cute phrase for a possibly deadly carrier of digital diseases. And biological ones. Is there a cure? I doubt it.
(Roger Marshall is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic)