The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine


EPISODE # 52

Bruce Schneier — Hacked! Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World (book cover)

Bruce Schneier is a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is a special advisor to IBM Security and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and the Tor Project. You can find him on Schneier.com and on twitter at @schneierblog

He is the author of Data and Goliath, Applied Cryptography, Liars and Outliers, Secrets and Lies, and Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World. His new book is Click Here to Kill Everybody, which we discuss at length, as well as:

  • How to protect yourself from being hacked and what to do if you are hacked
  • Why companies do not invest more in software security
  • The motivation of hackers: money, power, fun
  • The probability of your car being hacked and driven into a wall
  • The probability of planes being hacked and felled from the sky
  • Edward Snowden and Wikileaks: hero or villain
  • The Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg
  • What would happen if the electrical grid was hacked
  • Cyberdeaths (homicides done remotely over the Internet) and how the government will respond with regulations when it does
  • If the government were to set a policy for the security level of an IoT device that can kill people, is there a maximum allowed probability that it could be hacked?
  • The North Korean hack of Sony
  • The Russian hack of the 2016 election and how to prevent that from happening again
  • Why we’re still using paper ballots in our voting system rather than computers and ATMs like banks use.
  • The lessons of Y2K for the coming AI apocalypse
  • What keeps him up at night

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This Science Salon was recorded on January 21, 2019.

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This episode was released on February 5, 2019.

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