Cyber-Kinetic Security

Update January 26, 2021:

The book describes over 40 real-life non-public cyber-kinetic incidents that led to fatalities and/or injuries.

After several years of legal negotiations to obtain approvals to publicly discuss those incidents (anonymized), in a decision that was not surprising, but nevertheless disappointing, we failed to reach an agreement.

I guess I’m off to rewrite the book.

We live in a world in which the way we observe and control it is radically changing. Increasingly, we interact with physical objects through the filter of what computational systems embedded in them tell us, and we adjust them based on what those systems relate. This new and rapidly growing interconnectedness of cyber and physical realms offers us capabilities that exponentially exceed the expectations of science fiction writers and futurists of past generations. But it also introduces disquieting possibilities. Those possibilities reach beyond cyberspace to threaten the physical world in which we live and – potentially – our own physical well-being.

To understand those threats, this book will take a deeper look at the cyber-enabled physical world in which we live. The book will assess the vulnerabilities that cyber-connectedness opens and how it forces us to rethink our current approaches to cybersecurity. It will explore how those vulnerabilities can be – and, in some cases, already have been – used to inflict physical damage, and it will look at what we can do to reduce those risks and how to take proper actions to mitigate the impact of the attacks once they happen.