CYBER MURDER — The Internet of Everything will connect life to death

This is not just a philosophical imagination & but an abstract of future weapons & how murder will take a digital form in conjunction with the cyberspace. Hello, everyone…. I’m Gaurav (Security Researcher, philanthropist, and Future Predictor) and this is my first appearance in this platform.

Cyber-Crime Scene — Entry Prohibited

Everyone fell in love with someone or something. But, the internet has turned its affection towards the mass internet users who stay more than 15 hours connected to the internet. This love towards the internet can be threatening to the future “lovers”. The level of cybercrime is reaching its deadliest level. With the help of the internet, usually, people can do shopping, search what interests them, find dates, get socialize, and can even do study the classes that are on the horizon of daily users. Then a significant component of the internet in conjunction with the things started out as part of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Internet of Things (Read it from https://www.bytehash.com/single-post/2018/09/08/IoT-Basics) which helps to connect different things and daily work-around objects and their functionalities with the internet. It is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network with or without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. But the proximity of this technology has not stopped yet. It is now growing up with a much bigger term IoE (Internet of Everything) which covers a broad spectrum of the electro-cyber world. The Internet of Everything (IoE) can be considered as an extended version of the Internet of Things (IoT) which highlights the machine-to-machine (M2M) interaction & communications for describing a more intricate system which also encompasses the associated people, surrounding and processes.

But this new revolutionary technology also gave rise to a more sinister & threatening crime — “the Cyber Murder”. This terminology not only revolutionizes the way murder can be done or imagined but also brings threats to future users of technology. This term is not as popular as one to two scenarios are found these days where the technology is involved in the killing. In this article, I will take you to a whole new subject of cyber threat and its variations.

As the growth of IoE is increasing exponentially, almost every device can communicate with each other through some specific wireless or wired medium. This also gave a chance to the third party users to interfere with these devices and tweak or change the usual working procedures to do some malicious things. But, the criminal world and deep web have gone to its extreme level as they bring murders to action through the technological aspect, incubating a new level of crime to hatch. In the near future, other non-technical people will hire technical hackers and other cybercriminals via deep web sites to perform murders using these IoE devices, features, gadgets, and techniques. So you must be thinking about how this can be possible? There are various ways of doing this. I’ve done some research and classified cyber murders into 3 broad categories — —

i) Active cyber murder

ii) Passive Cyber murder

iii) Murderer-in-the-Middle

Let’s first give a glimpse of these 3 types:

Active cyber murder is when the murder is done using cyberspace and technologies where the murderer is directly associated with the crime. Example: Hacking the power-station or any research station by malfunctioning & locking down the entire station keeping the employees inside and then leaking the chemicals through malware is where the attacker is directly involved with the attack and is doing the hack straightaway; killing many people with a single move.

Passive cyber murder is performed when the murderer is not directly involved in the murder planted by his actions. Example: let suppose, a malware was injected in an automated car which changes the functionalities and object detection algorithm of the car. This might kill the pedestrians roaming around the road or might threaten the passenger sitting in the car. Here, the attacker only wrote the malfunctioning code and injected it. He is not controlling the car to run over the pedestrian; hence making the attack passive.

Murderer-in-the-middle is a form of attack when the cyber murderer is involved in tweaking & altering the usual process of a system from one participant to another making a disastrous change in the plan. There are reports of many politicians and bureaucrats (cannot mention the reports) who got killed because of the change in financial records while the transaction is done online.

You can check out other articles (such as drone technology, MAVs, autonomous vehicles: https://www.bytehash.com/blog-1) before continuing this. Tesla and some other companies are not only trying to make their cars autonomous but also connect them by all means possible. Like the speed of cars can be controlled using hand-held devices, GPS and other tracking systems are incorporated within a car that can help in making things much more effective. Similarly, different smart home devices like Google Home and Alexa are used in every house which not only used for entertainment purpose but also are getting integrated with IoT devices for taking commands and perform household tasks such as switching on and off the lights and other electronic appliances, regulate room temperatures through ACs, and manage the sensors for detecting different actions that are primarily meant for IoT use. But, you cannot imagine what the possible threats are; these interconnected devices are posing to the future of mankind. A single vulnerability in any system or even AI robots can let hackers access their systems and technologies and let others face the menace of killing, even mass killing.

AI and robots are not the only issues of the next generation of crimes, autonomous car systems, flying vehicles if contain vulnerabilities can also be used as a massive killing agent. This can let hackers crack their systems and get access to their manual human control system and can increase the speed of the car or may lock as well as jam the car windows and shut the glasses since each and every component of these autonomous cars are connected to the internet. Also, the GPS in different vehicles can be altered to mislead the driver or the autonomous system in the wrong direction which may lead the passengers of the car to death. This is one simple way of performing cyber murder. Another potential way can be through drones. Drones equipped with laser guns and smart bullets can cause instant death or even mass killing. This can be done using the nano bullets integrated with harmful chemicals or drones that can be used to trigger bio war by spreading biological toxins in any particular society or location and create an arena of mass murder.

Drones used for defense can be hacked since they contain surveillance cameras and smart weapons attached to them; which hackers can control and target the victim and carry out strong surveillance and can even shot them dead. All these are examples of fully autonomous hacking and cyber murders. There can be another form of murder that is not fully dependent on technology rather it will be a combination o both technology and manual murders. If your mobile’s or laptop’s front camera gets hacked or even your smart devices and IoT appliances of your house get hacked, cybercriminals in collaboration with serial killers can keep track of where you are going and what activity you are performing. They can ask for ransom and can even threaten in taking your life if the ransom is not paid. In this way also, a technical and manual cyber murder is possible where the technology is used for detecting and analyzing the victim’s movement and then ransoms are demanded by murderers. Tracking each and every people nowadays has become so easy because of the large number of app users. The GPS tracking and allowing of permissions to all applications have made things easy for hackers, app owners, third-party vendors & cybercriminals to take access to your personal data very easily. This way the murderers can even pose threats to you and your family members just by using the technology. Internet and databases are nowadays interlinked with health devices as well. Various hospitals’ equipment is also directly connected to the internet. Such type of equipment malfunctioned murder has already taken place where the data fed to the equipment were altered which gave the patient the wrong dose and drag to death.

Governments and other national organizations are not prepared to face or combat such looming cyber threats. The forensic department of cyber cell in police departments & their techniques needs to “acclimatize & grow” for addressing the dangers caused by this so-called IoE (Internet of Everything) — which not only gave us a new era of technological interconnectivity with everything right from garage doors to hospital health systems, and controlled by computers and networks, but also gave rise to the new resolution of the crime.