Could 2025 see the largest cyberattack in history?
In a just-published series of very brief essays called “The Incredible, World-Altering ‘Black Swan’ Events That Could Upend Life in 2025”, Politico asked “15 futurists, foreign policy analysts and other prognosticators”, including me, “to provide some explosive potential scenarios for the new year”.
My essay was about the small but very real possibility that 2025 could see the worst cyberattack in history, perhaps catalyzed in some fashion by generative AI (which was #24 in my list of 25 AI predictions for 2025).
Here is a teaser:
You can read the rest of mine (ie the four possible accelerants), and the rest of the short but provocative essays, here.
Perhaps not just before bed.
Running out of ideas @Gary? Very disappointed about the clickbait. Didn’t expect this on this otherwise controversial but interesting channel.
This would have been a rock-solid prediction even without Gen AI helping scammers and scumbag coders of all stripes. We've reported on this at The Technoskeptic. Every year since electronic health records (EHR) were mandated for adoption in the US, there were more hacks than the previous year. EHRS are a fat target because hospitals often cough up the cash. 2024 set a new record at ~100,000,000 Americans health records were exposed in a massive pharmacy records hack.
Now add to already-crap security on EHR systems what scumbags can use easily-jailbroken LLMs to help them do.
Pro tip-and I mean this in deadly earnest. Download a copy of your EHRs from your patient portal. It is entirely possible by the end of 2025, you'll have the only unstolen and uncorrupted copy of them. That might come in handy.