What War Will Look Like In The Future

Apetech Website: https://www.apetech.me/social Voicemail: https://anchor.fm/apetech/message Email: [email protected] I recently read a tweet that stated that war in the future will not be fought with guns, tanks, or bombs.  It will be fought with networks, data, and artificial intelligence.  I want to talk about this since I’ve spent a good amount of my career in both spaces.  I’ve worked in large defense companies, developing advanced warfare systems and I’ve also been a cyber security specialist for some time now. I agree that the future of warfare is going to look drastically different in the future. I also believe that our “enemies” are going to look different in the future as well.  Before I go any further, this is all going to be from a U.S. perspective.  If you live in another country, you might have a different definition for what an enemy is. Every day, there is a new cyber threat that you can read about in the news.  Entire power plants have been crippled by hackers and I believe that we are only just beginning to see what a truly digital warfare is going to look like.  As a country, I do not believe that we are prepared enough for this new enemy.  All of our military protocols are so ancient that no amount of training out in the desert is going to prepare our country to handle the numerous attacks that could come in the future. The main difference here is that cyber warfare can happen just about anywhere.  As more and more of our services and utilities go online, more attack vectors are created.  These attack vectors can be taken advantage of and have the potential to really cripple our country.  Individuals that are responsible for keeping the lights on do not really know how to handle an attack at a level that could cause severe damage. Almost all critical infrastructure in the U.S. is going digital.  And it almost has to because we expect our infrastructure to keep up with the rest of technology.  But, some are still hesitant and some things don’t change.  For example, many of our identification cards are still physical along with vehicle registrations.  But vehicle registrations in California are going digital.  And this is where the problems start.  How safe are those digital license plates?  Can they be hacked or manipulated?  What kind of updates are being pushed to those plates?  How are they tested against malicious attacks?   So many questions that as consumers, we don’t always get all the information.  Now, you can imagine an exploit becoming known that you can change the registration on a vehicle because of a bug that wasn’t patched.  Granted, this might not be a doomsday scenario, but I don’t really trust the developers that help digitalize our infrastructure because I’ve been in the business long enough to understand how cyber security is handled.  Frankly put, it’s not a priority most of the time and if this mentality is shared among the critical infrastructure sectors, I predict that complete mayhem is upon us. We have to do better.  We have to invest more of our development efforts into not only creating better software and infrastructure, but also training individuals to be more cyber aware.  Sure, software could have issues, but attackers still need to physically access these devices.  And most of the time, these devices are being accessed because the individuals that are paid to utilize those systems allow attackers right in.  In their defense, they don't always know they are doing so, but therein lies the problem.   --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/apetech/support