The technological arsenal available to cyber criminals is already enough to give any security professional nightmares, but there’s another emerging threat on the horizon that may keep them up at night: bio-augmented hackers. Implantable chips and other modifications are growing in capability and sophistication, and there are a variety of creative ways that attackers can use them to carry out both physical and device-based attacks -
This is made all the more concerning by the fact that these implants are all but impossible to detect. This week, we’re joined by CyberArk technical evangelist, white hat hacker and self-described transhumanist Len Noe to find out what kind of augmentations cyber criminals currently have access to, how can they be used in intrusions, and why the industry needs to start preparing for their implementation now - as well as some of the positive uses that this technology can be put to.
Highlights
“Would you like me to tell you how I get through an airport? I put the left foot in front of the right and then I repeat. That's it… There is not enough combined metal in all of my implants to actually trigger a magnetometer… even if I'm doing the X-ray metal detector, [it] doesn't show up, I can walk straight through, the magnetometer will not trigger.”
“I know that I'm using it. I know of quite a few people who are on red teams that are using this technology. We have not found any indications from any type of incidents that have actually happened in the wild where implants were shown to be the root cause, but at the same time, how would you be able to determine that - and therein lies the problem.”
“From… an actual implementation perspective, there is currently no way to actually detect an augmented human with this type of technology inside the body. And that becomes a very large problem for security professionals. And the only way that I can really give as a way to try and combat this is a true defence in depth, and a layered security approach.”
Read the full transcript here.
Footnotes
- The IT Pro Podcast: The secret life of hackers
- Stories from the front line: The secrets of the Red Team revealed
- Trade Unions Congress fearful of implanting workers with tracking chips
- Should employees be microchipped?
- What is Neuralink?
- ARM fights paralysis with brain implant chips
- What is penetration testing?
- Should human augmentation technology be regulated?
- IT Pro 20/20: The future of augmentation
- The IT Pro Podcast: Can technology make us more than human?
- The IT Pro Podcast: Should companies spy on their employees?
- BSidesSF 2022 - Biohacker: The Invisible Threat (Len Noe) - YouTube
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