I read this report in the Wall Street Journal saying that US officials and private experts are warned about being warned about possible cyber attacks as a reciprocation from Iran. So I thought i'd run this by futurist Skeeve Stevens, who's on the phone. Good morning to you. Iran's capability is it any good or is it we compared to the others.
When we talk about significant, we're talking about significant as they are a nation state.
What that means is do they have a lot of capabilities?
Do they have a limited money to do this sort of things? Yes, they do, but when it comes down to things like versus Israel or the United States, they're in a kindergarten level, right. Iran essentially causes chaos, not damage.
So what they can do is I run around and.
They're mostly using things like social media, fake person personalities, try to mess things up, muddle things up. So the example of throwing from the shadows, meaning they can just cause mess, but they don't really cause damage and significant damage, but they can cause a bit of problems.
Because I'm led to believe that they have been doing cyber attacks for a while.
So they just like to cause chaos and a certain things.
So they've like they've done things in the past where they've hacked some of the water supply in Israel. But you know, every time suddenly happens in Israel, they get even better and better and better at it. I mean, Israel's potentially I would classify as number one in the planet in cyber warfare capabilities. So most of the time Israel, sorry to Israel, Iran likes to use their proxies. So
that's even with hacking groups and things like that. So Hezblah has their little cyber activist units and so they're mostly their proxies or people that believe in their sort of I guess their philosophy, like to do little attacks here and there where I mean in the previously the time that banks where they've like caused malware problems. They like to face websites and do simple denial of service attacks.
It's basically chaos. This is the way I refer to it as it's like.
Messing things up as opposed to taking things like the United States.
And Israel and even to a certain degree Australia.
If we attack someone's infrastructure, they're literally off the Internet, they're going to be destroyed for a significant period of time.
So it's less strategic and more problematic. Then, yeah, that's what I would say.
It's less strategic, and I mean they're more opportunistic as opposed to strategic, meaning if they can break into some supermarket websites or cause chaos and maybe take down with the denial of service attack like either a bank or some political websites during an election. That's the sort of things I like to do. It's just like think of them as you know, those protesters that are just run around the streets breaking things.
That's the way that I run.
I run works from a cyber perspective, but it does cause annoyance.
To a certain degree.
Okay, so they're not in the same league. Is Russia, say, China or North Korea in places like that, then.
Yeah, I mean North Carea is quite limited, but Russia and China they do have significant resources. If places like that are going to a take you let's say they were going to attack Australia, they would be going after electricity supplies, gas supplies, water supplies, those sort of things.
So it's I've.
Always said for many years now, the next war will not be with soldiers on the front line.
It'll be you and me sitting in our homes when the power goes out or the gas goes out.
I remember many years ago, many many years ago, on a union in Melbourne, the gas supply infrastructure in Victoria went out and we literally had to have like cold showers for about two weeks as they repaired it. So that's the sort of thing that they could take out now. It's also one of the things people don't understand is while there are lots of remote attacks, attributing blame is quite difficult because very rarely well a remote states such as Iran, Russia, China attack from.
Their own country.
It's very easy for us to actually block traffic from those countries.
But what they do is they hack something in Germany.
That Germany server will hack something in Singapore at Singapore service will has something in Australia, so the hack will actually look like it comes.
From Australia itself.
So trying to say, oh, we're blocking all traffic from xyz country when everyone says that, I just kind of blob and go, yeah, Really, the Internet is designed not to ever be affected, and you cannot take the Internet down.
I was in Queensland in the eighties when Sea queb the Southeast Queensland Electricity Board we're having issues with the Jobi occupedis and government and they intermittently cut off the power and people were just going nuts. And I did read that after seventy two hours, that's when people really start to lose their mind if they haven't got electricity and they haven't got hot water, like you said, so something even for that minimal amount of time does cause a huge amount of disruption.
Absolutely does.
We have.
It's a weird psychological effect.
If you're sitting in your house, like I'm sitting here right now, if my power goes out.
I go, what the hell? What's going on?
And then if I walk outside though, and I see the entire streets out, I go, okay, shared suffering, Yeah.
Right, that's right. We sort of chill out a bit. But after a.
Period with electricity, especially when you lose start to lose monetary value, like all the items in your freezer and things like that, that's when people start to get upset.
But the thing that affects us the most is the things that we never think about.
You don't sit here turning your tap on going, oh, look at that, My taft's awesome.
I look at my phone. Until you don't have this exactly.
Until these things that are just air to us, that that we just breed daily, until they got to take it away from us, we don't realize. But this is how we are going to be on the front line. But also all of the countries and I'm sure Australia to we have operatives in all these other countries. This is they all operators here, so they don't this is just have to attack remotely siberly.
From far far away. They can do things here too.
I did see that the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how regulators and governments were issuing warnings to businesses to check their defenses. Are the usual defenses we've got in place? Okay? Is there anything else that we need to do in terms of what security we've got.
I'm sorry to say this, Shire, but we are probably one percent of what we need. Most people try to do things themselves. It's like having backups. When was the last time you even heard about people backing up servers? Yeah?
Right? And like people just related to rely on the cloud.
They relying whatever product they buy, and they also rely on whatever it's.
It integrator is telling them. Are we vulnerable?
Absolutely, We don't change the passwords of our routers. Like I did a talk the other day about accessing web cameras, and the problem is it is so easy, and people just keep the same factory default settings where you can look into people's cameras, to their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their offices, and you can see what's going on.
Because people don't bother. They just assume that technology is safe. Now with everything from a few years ago is very different now.
If you go to Bunning's website and look for the term grid connect, you will see fans, heaters, light switches, power.
Everything is smart now. Everything has an IP address.
And I think it was last year that I was messing with my neighbor because he would have bought a fan and.
He didn't realize I was a smart fan and I was working on my network at the time, and I didn't do it. It's on purpose.
I went, oh, I don't know what's going on here. There's a fan added itself to my network. So I was turning his van on and off at three o'clock in the morning and he didn't even realize I was a smart fan and didn't know what was happening. Now, imagine if that was like one of those little twenty dollars powerpoints with an IP address in it, and I'm turning on and off something that's actually quite critical. Wow, everything is smart. Now, everything is smart.
I wonder what people would be more annoyed at losing a hot shower or the Internet.
I mean, this is the Internet these days are kind of ubiquitous. I mean, I sit here, I'm using starlink, so you can't cut my cables. But then most people are on five five G and mobile phones, so to take out most people's.
Internet today, you'd actually have to take out the cellular their works. So it's quite hard these days to do a lot of that.
And the Internet's designed specifically to within built innate failover. Now, this is the sad thing is your house might not work, your fridge might not work. You can't do anything, but you can still post on TikTok.
Well, maybe I should have rephrased the question, what do you think people would be more afraid to lose Facebook or toilet paper?
Facebook probably made always good to do it. You Thank you so much. No problem will