00:00Let's talk more about this. Dr. Conor McCohen is a lecturer in digital media at the University of Stirling in
00:06Scotland.
00:06Hi Conor, great to speak to you again. Let's start with the France attack.
00:11It's unprecedented. Why do you think the hackers would go after supermarket fridges?
00:17Well, it might seem strange to attack fridges, but it really doesn't have that much to do with the fridges
00:23themselves.
00:24It more has to do with something called the connectivity paradox.
00:27So if you've studied cybersecurity, basically you know what the most secure system of all is,
00:34and that is an air-gapped system, which means that your computers aren't connected to the Internet at all, really,
00:40and that most checks are done by human actors without networks really posing any risk.
00:47That is the most secure system that you can have.
00:49The problem is that's extremely expensive, and the more devices you add to that system
00:55in order to try and make it more secure, actually the more vulnerabilities you end up creating.
01:00So in the case of Danfoss' system, they had another problem where they were remotely servicing France,
01:09and so they had to create a system wherein they didn't need to send physical agents across Europe
01:15in order to check everything was working.
01:17And so you end up with just a lot of different vulnerabilities across a huge scale of different devices all
01:23spread around,
01:23and that's really, oh, that's catnip to a hacker,
01:27because there's going to be a vulnerability that can be exploited somewhere.
01:31It seems like more and more household-named companies are becoming victims of cyber attacks.
01:36Are hackers becoming more sophisticated,
01:38or are companies just not keeping up with the level of security needed?
01:44Oh, kind of both.
01:46Hackers are definitely becoming more sophisticated,
01:49especially through the use of AI tools.
01:52You know, we're able to find vulnerabilities that would have taken companies months of research
01:59in order to find, and importantly, would have taken huge budgets to find,
02:04because we now have essentially automated those same human systems in such a way that we can find these exploits
02:12a lot more quickly.
02:13So that has enabled hackers to do things at a scale and speed that we've never seen before.
02:19But at the same time, companies, I think, don't have the budgets that they would like to invest in these
02:25security systems.
02:26And, you know, as you've said, we've seen that with Marks and Spencers.
02:29We've even seen that with the NHS, who didn't have the money that they wanted to update their Windows system
02:35to the latest operating systems to avoid known hardware vulnerabilities.
02:39And it really just comes down to budgets and margins.
02:43So it's two things working in tandem at the same time,
02:46and it's really going to lead to a huge increase in cyber attacks in the near future.
02:51Thanks, Connor.
02:52Dr. Connor McKeown, lecturer in digital media at the University of Stirling.
02:56And back to you, Sally.
02:58Thanks so much. Really fascinating interview.
