on 4 September 2009First it was computers, then mobile phones. Now hackers have found a way to compromise keyboards. What’s going to be the next cyber-security threat? Biscuits?
The vulnerability was announced at a hackers’ conference, the kind of event you imagine being organised by the Penguin to attract the attention of Batman. It relies on hijacking the updating of the Mac keyboard’s firmware. This will come as a shock to anyone who’d never suspected a bunch of on/off switches needed updates. A modern Apple keyboard, we’re told, has 8K of flash memory and 256 bytes of ‘working RAM’. Working on what, exactly? Its forehand? A cocktail called ‘Grounds for Divorce’? A doctoral thesis on the signification of pressedness?
Fortunately, keyboard hacking may soon disappear, along with keyboards. It’s already possible to type on an iPhone, if you have narrow fingers and what you want to say is largely predictable, so Mischa Barton is sorted. Apple is rumoured to be planning a bigger machine that will avoid much of the awkwardness, although the Send button will still be next to the Delete key to keep things interesting.
But it’s only a matter of time before malware catches up. It’s an endless arms race between the protectors and the attackers, and we know who makes more money out of it. The Oakland Raiders play at the McAfee Coliseum, named after the anti-virus company; you don’t see a bunch of rootkit coders sponsoring major league football. Well, unless you count Sony.
Hacking isn’t always sophisticated. Gary McKinnon, who can now only be saved from imprisonment in the US if somebody can remember who the British Home Secretary is, was inspired by the film WarGames to hack into American military systems, where he, um, had a look at some things and, er, wrote some messages. Did Gary create and deploy an arsenal of futuristic network-tunnelling virtual spybots? He did not. He dialled into servers with his modem and looked to see if their administrators had bothered changing the passwords that came with their software. Not even Lars von Trier would make a film out of that.
Some observers have suggested that instead of prosecuting Gary, the Pentagon should offer him a job as a security consultant. A clue to the level of good sense in this is provided by the fact that one of those observers is Boris Johnson. Employing Gary McKinnon as a security consultant would be like catching a six-year-old nicking sweets and enrolling him in Hendon Police College. Hackers categorise themselves, according to the level of danger they present, as White Hats, Grey Hats, and Black Hats. Gary was more of a Silly Hat With Ear Flaps And A Little Bell On Top, prancing around whacking random bits of kit with a pig’s bladder on a stick. Actually, Gary and Boris have a lot in common.
As I write, Twitter and Facebook have been affected by a concerted attack against services used by the Georgian blogger Cyxymu (you can see why he’s not all that well known in the West), coinciding with the anniversary of the Georgian war on South Ossetia, or the Russian war on Georgia, depending on your point of view. Now that’s hacking. Bringing down websites used by millions of ordinary people, not for planning military maneouvres but for nattering about nothing in particular, reporting their success in identifying 1980s TV theme tunes and posting poorly focused photos of their sister’s baby – this, truly, is an attack on our way of life. But it’s not the worst thing to happen in South Ossetia.
If you left your back door open, anti-hacking commentators ask rhetorically, would it be OK for people to wander in and raid your fridge? We know the answer is no, because that’s what our mothers and their mothers would have said. Privacy and property are concepts hardwired not just into people but into many other animals; try invading a bear’s territory or making off with his dinner.
When the social anthropologist Margaret Mead visited what she called ‘primitive societies’ in the idealistic 1960s, she returned with stories of strange and wonderful cultures with no back doors, living proof that humanity was a blank slate on which any attitude or aspiration could be written. Oh, and there were unicorns too. The writers of Cheers were nearer the mark when they said ‘people are all the same’, although Kirstie Alley often wasn’t the same even in successive episodes.
People are not blank slates, and we can’t hack their sense of right and wrong to suit the temporary requirements of digital capitalism. Our most vulnerable asset is our humanity, and that should be the first thing we protect.
When he heard they were attacking blogs in Georgia, Adam Banks changed his to Verdana.
Twitter cannot be reached right now. —