The easy access that scammers have to sophisticated AI tools means everything from emails to video calls can’t be trusted.
Imagine you meet someone new. Be it on a dating app or social media, you chance across each other online and get to talking. They’re genuine and relatable, so you quickly take it out of the DMs to a platform like Telegram or WhatsApp. You exchange photos and even video call each over. You start to get comfortable. Then, suddenly, they bring up money.
They need you to cover the cost of their Wi-Fi access, maybe. Or they’re trying out this new cryptocurrency. You should really get in on it early! And then, only after it’s too late, you realize that the person you were talking to was in fact not real at all.
In the very near future, victory will belong to the savvy blackhat hacker who uses AI to generate code at scale.
In the near future one hacker may be able to unleash 20 zero-day attacks on different systems across the world all at once. Polymorphic malware could rampage across a codebase, using a bespoke generative AI system to rewrite itself as it learns and adapts. Armies of script kiddies could use purpose-built LLMs to unleash a torrent of malicious code at the push of a button.
A major cyberattack on the US electrical grid has long worried security experts. Such an attack wouldn’t be easy. But if an adversary pulled it off, it’d be lights out in more ways than one.
When the lights went out across the Iberian Peninsula in April, everything ground to a halt. Scores of people were trapped in Madrid’s underground metro system. Hospitals in Lisbon had to switch to emergency generators. Internet service as far away as Greenland and Morocco went down.
While the cause remains unclear, the actual damage to the Iberian power grid—and the people it serves—was relatively minor. Less than 24 hours after the outage began, the region’s electricity operators managed to get the grid back online. Even if things could have been much worse, the outage was both an unnerving reminder of how suddenly things can go offline.
A quantum computer will likely one day be able to break the encryption protecting the world's secrets. See how much faster such a machine could decrypt a password compared to a present-day supercomputer.
It is likely, if not inevitable, that quantum computers will soon be able to break the encryption methods that secure your passwords, your data, and anything else kept under digital lock and key.
That’s because, while classic computers fundamentally operate on 1s and 0s, quantum machines play by different rules. They use “quantum bits,” or qubits, that transcend binaries. They can exist as a 1 or a 0 or something else entirely. That flexibility will likely allow future quantum computers to quickly solve certain types of problems—like cracking cryptographic codes—that traditional computers simply can’t.
How big is the gap?
Everyone knows what it’s like to lose cell service. A burgeoning open source project called Meshtastic is filling the gap for when you’re in the middle of nowhere—or when disaster strikes.
Hypothetical: You wake up tomorrow morning to find a superstorm that developed overnight thanks to climate change has sparked a chain of events that abruptly ushers in a new ice age and alters human society as we know it. (Yes, this is the plot of The Day After Tomorrow. Stick with us.) All the communication networks you relied on are down. Your phone is basically worthless. The internet has functionally ceased to exist. But you need to connect with people you trust to get help and survive. What do you do? More importantly, how did you prepare?
GPS jamming and spoofing attacks are on the rise. If the global navigation system the US relies on were to go down entirely, it would send the world into unprecedented chaos.
Around 12,500 miles above our heads, the satellites that make up the Global Positioning System (GPS) quietly keep the world running. A blackout would result in almost instantaneous chaos.
“You would see traffic jams, a lot more traffic accidents, because transportation is going to see the first most immediate impact,” says Dana Goward, the founder of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a charity which works to strengthen GPS. Thousands of planes in the air, which use GPS among other systems for navigation and precision landing, would face a wave of uncertainty.