From cybercrime to bioprime?

Crime of tomorrow

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

One of the popular science bestsellers of 2015 in the USA was Mark Goodman's book "Crimes of the Future". In it, a former Los Angeles police officer with experience in Interpol, the CIA and the Secret Service, who advised the police departments of dozens of countries, discusses the unprecedented crimes that await us in the XXI century. Offenses that no one has ever thought about until now, using techniques and tools that no one had ever suspected before.

Alas, the oldest crimes – robbery, murder, etc. – never leave the scene of history, moreover, new ones are constantly joining them. The criminal world is very willing to adopt the latest achievements of science and technology. At the beginning of the twentieth century, such an invention as an acetylene torch remained almost unnoticed by the public until robbers began using it to open bank safes. At the beginning of the XXI century, "onion routing" for the secret exchange of information between computers led to the development of a whole "dark Internet", where passports, weapons and drugs can be purchased almost at every corner.

According to Mark Goodman, we have special problems with the Network: by connecting more and more new devices to it, we forget that everything accessible from the outside can be hacked sooner or later. No existing technologies and security agencies are enough to counter the growing threat. The Internet is developing many times faster than its means of protection, and all this is no more effective than trying to hide from a nuclear explosion behind a sunscreen. "It's time for a cold–blooded reassessment of the state of affairs," Goodman writes. – It's time to implement a new "Manhattan project" in the field of cybersecurity."

Such a "Manhattan Project" should unite the efforts of the best scientists and developers, universities and government organizations, corporations and civil society. According to Goodman, it is worth attracting entrepreneurs and politicians, lawyers and the military to it – and its goal should be to create a full–fledged, comprehensive protection, including more secure equipment, operating systems and software at least at the national, and preferably at the global level.

In the computer

One of the first high-profile hacker attacks was committed by an American student and later one of the most famous hackers Kevin Mitnick. In 1983, having deftly lured out the access password in a telephone conversation, he penetrated the ARPANet network and managed to log into the Pentagon computers, gaining access to their files. Mitnik was arrested, convicted and spent six months in a youth correctional center. In 1994, Vladimir Levin hacked into Citibank's central server and tried to empty its clients' accounts. In 1999, 16-year-old Jonathan James broke into NASA servers and stole several files, including the source codes of the ISS program management.

In January 2003, the attack of the Slammer virus slowed down the speed of the Internet on a global scale, and some countries – such as South Korea – were completely cut off from the Network. In April 2009, the American media reported that hackers had stolen several terabytes of classified information about the fifth-generation multirole fighter F-35 Lightning II. A year later, the Stuxnet virus infected the computers of Iranian institutions involved in the work on its nuclear program. The targeted activation of Stuxnet disabled the centrifuges necessary for the enrichment of nuclear fuel. At the end of the same 2010, the hacker group Anonymous conducted a series of DDoS attacks on the websites of companies that opposed the work of the WikiLeaks resource, including PayPal, Visa and MasterCard.

In March 2011, the hackers' prey were EMC servers and data on SecurID technology, which is used in the protection of corporate computer networks. In 2012, the websites of a number of opposition Russian media were attacked. In 2013, government websites of Belgium, Venezuela, Peru were hacked, and an attack on the website of anti-spammers from Spamhaus again led to a slowdown in the Internet on a global scale. In 2014, hackers took possession of information about civil servants stored in the Office of the Personnel Service of the United States. Hacks of Home Depot, Target retail chains, Sony personnel service servers, Anthem medical insurance company (already 2015) and other organizations have made the personal data of hundreds of millions of Network users a prey to hackers. Take a look in the mirror: you are probably already on this list

Outside the computer

In other things, hackers today will not surprise anyone, too many people have faced hacking of computers and accounts. But the dangers that Goodman talks about do not end there. Crimes are becoming so high-tech that they can amaze the imagination. For example, a few years ago, law enforcement officers were shocked to discover that several drug cartels in Mexico had organized their own, unknown to outsiders, secure communications network that operated in all states of the country. "Technology is making our world more and more open, and, as a rule, this is for the best," says the security expert. "However, this openness may have unexpected consequences." The growing popularity of the concept of the "Internet of things", in which more and more diverse devices should receive access to the world Wide Web, brings special threats. Medical equipment and power plants, implantable devices and security systems – the easier it is to work with them, the easier access is for intruders. In 2008, a group of terrorists attacked Mumbai, India. The tragedy stretched for several days: criminals armed with machine guns and grenades, without hesitation, opened fire on civilians. But they also used more sophisticated technologies – after the destruction of the terrorists, they found mobile phones and night vision devices.

Following social networks, they went out to places with large crowds of people. They even had their own "Situation Center", which monitored the development of events and coordinated the actions of individual groups in real time from abroad, from the territory of Pakistan. According to eyewitnesses, while firing with one hand, the terrorists followed the messages on their mobile phones with the other – and ten murderers managed to plunge the 20-million megalopolis into chaos for more than 60 hours.

The crimes of the past concerned individuals. Today, millions of people can be made victims in one fell swoop. The hacking of the cryptographic protection of the Sony PlayStation game console affected more than 100 million people. No Al Capone ever dreamed of robbing so many people at the same time. However, the challenges of the future are not limited to cybercrime at all. It seems that violators of the law are trying to "ride" and turn to their advantage all the most promising areas of modern technology.

According to Mark Goodman, recently in the United States, the FBI arrested an Al-Qaeda supporter who was preparing to attack government buildings using remotely controlled drones loaded with explosive plastid C-4. Even such seemingly harmless technology as 3D printing has already found its "black craftsmen". The drawings of the Liberator pistol, designed and tested by Defense Distributed, allowed anyone to print firearms (and invisible to metal detectors) if they had access to a 3D printer. The print models uploaded to the Pirate Bay website quickly became a hit and were downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users.

Inside the living

Living systems with their DNA and cells don't look too much like computers – this comparison can only be made with a big stretch. However, they also have similarities: DNA carries information that is copied and instructions that are executed. So, this process can be hacked – the question is the availability of practically available technologies. These technologies are still imperfect, but they are developing at an alarming rate.

If we draw a parallel with classical computer hacking, then, according to Mark Goodman, they are somewhere at the level of the late 1970s. "Biohackers" is still a romantic and even somewhat noble occupation. But biotechnologies are certainly not improving more slowly than digital ones once did. The first complete sequencing of the human genome was completed only in 2000 and required the participation of laboratories in many countries, which spent about $ 2 billion. Today, such work will cost 2,500, and by the end of the decade it will cost several dollars.

The efforts of generations of scientists have led to a real revolution in biological, genetic and medical technologies. We are able not only to read DNA, but also to change them in a targeted way, and the latest approaches – such as CRISPS/CAS9 – allow us to do this with good accuracy and efficiency. A whole field of genetic engineering is developing, the main goal of which is to create organisms with predetermined properties. Most importantly, such interventions no longer require multimillion-dollar investments and huge laboratories.

So far, biological attacks by terrorists have not led to real disasters. The distribution of anthrax spores in the United States in 2001 led to the death of only five people. But let's remember other terrorists – the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect, whose members sprayed sarin poison gas in the Tokyo subway. Before its activities were suppressed, the leadership of the sect invested more than $ 10 million in the development of biological weapons, which had no analogues – it would not be detected by standard tests and had no pre-prepared methods of struggle. Fortunately, in the 1990s, when the sect was operating, it was too difficult, and the "development program" was curtailed. But today it is quite affordable.

Samples of the most dangerous microorganisms are stored under careful control, in protected laboratories and depositories, access to which is restricted. However, their genome can be found in the public domain – on the Web – which means that theoretically they can be recreated. And it is better not to think about what kind of chaos an epidemic panic can sow on a worldwide scale. It can only be compared with the panic around the memorable "Problem of 2000" that struck the digital world at the turn of the XXI century.

In the future

Mark Goodman believes that, in general, "bioprime" will develop like the cybercrime familiar to everyone. And if the most common form of the latter is sending spam, something similar will be adopted by "biohackers". Their "letters of happiness" are just fragments of DNA that can be "sent out" and embedded into the genome of the "recipient" with the help of carrier viruses. What for? To make money!

An elementary example is an ordinary cold. A harmless, but very common infectious disease caused by rhinoviruses. By themselves, they are something like "live spam" that only needs to be pushed. A new artificial form of this virus (in addition to the hundreds of already known natural varieties), without encountering any obstacles from the immune system, will quickly spread around the world. In principle, it's okay, but what money can be made on vitamins, remedies for runny nose and cough!.. Today, this market is approaching the figure of $ 30 billion annually. Another variant of cybercrime is phishing – the creation of websites and services that mimic real-life ones in order to lure out logins, passwords, PIN codes and other personal data of their users. And he may have a biological analogue: stealing someone else's DNA in order to decrypt and obtain confidential information about a person. It is almost impossible for an ordinary citizen to prevent the "leakage" of his DNA. We leave our cells, hair and saliva everywhere, but if the DNA of ordinary citizens is unlikely to be of particular interest to anyone, then many people are interested in digging into the genome of the powerful.

The "Biopaparazzi" will certainly be interested in the DNA samples of Hollywood celebrities left on a napkin, because in them you can find a lot of interesting things about the origin and diseases hidden from the public, and even something about the character traits of the star. And who knows what it will be possible to find out in another 10 years! During negotiations, diplomats may benefit from the propensity of the leader of another country for excitement and taking risky decisions. And using their DNA as a key to gain access to top–secret information is probably only a matter of time.

By the way, using someone else's DNA to plant evidence at the crime scene and cover up traces has long been a practice in the criminal world. Perhaps some criminals have adopted such modern methods as polymerase chain reaction: with it, you can throw someone else's DNA by taking possession of only a tiny initial sample – a hair or remnants of saliva on the edge of a glass – and "multiplying" the genome to the desired amount.

Next – everywhere

When we talk about the upcoming appearance of biological analogues of all types of cybercrime, we are not exaggerating. Any of them can be offered a couple in the world of illegal biotechnologies of the future. DoS attacks with their millions of meaningless requests that can "overwhelm" almost any site on the Web for a long time? Please – uncontrolled distribution of infectious agents through mail, water supply, places of mass gathering of people. Microbes may not even be dangerous: with the help of the same cold, but on a huge scale, you can shake the entire world economy.

Piracy? Of course – it may concern formulas and technologies for the production of expensive medicines. Available through "official channels" to only a few rich people, they can also be distributed underground in the form of a tiny pinch of a lyophilized culture of genetically modified bacteria capable of synthesizing the right substance. And there will certainly be no shortage of biological analogues of viruses and other malicious software. Just as the Stuxnet computer code once disabled entire enterprises, so live pathogens can paralyze the work of companies and states.

Of course, all this is still just a fantasy about the not-so-distant future. However, judging by how rapidly biotechnologies are developing, how rapidly they penetrate into our lives, parallels with the digital world are quite useful here. And if we still do not know what to do with cybercriminals, then it is even more unclear what to do with "bio-criminals". We may need another "Manhattan Project"–or even more than one.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  18.09.2017