Watch Dogs: Fears, Concerns and Closing Statements

With a game that deals with such a serious issue such as hacking, it is only natural that Watch Dogs would raise some concerns, especially when we take the previous blog posts that shows how realistic the hacking capabilities of real world hackers are matching the realms of fiction. One such example is the FOX news caster Glenn Beck, who believes that games such as Watch Dogs will teach a whole generation of Americans to become professional hackers. However this appears to be the ravings of a man who has clearly not researched this subject, as it has been repeatedly reiterated by Watch Dogs developers Ubisoft and by security companies such as Kaspersky Labs that the game is no more than a simulation.

If Watch Dogs can be considered a teaching tool in regards to hacking it would be more in the form of a warning about the realities of hacking and as an article from the Guardian in May of 2014 states, Watch Dogs is more of a ‘wake-up call’ regarding the issue of internet security and how important the need for protection in our modern day tech reliant society truly is.

In closing, I look back to my introductory blog post where I stated how I wanted to show how the media portrays the world of hacking. By using Watch Dogs as my example I believe I have shown established that aim. Furthermore I have also established through the use of additional media such as the Game Theory mini-series and examples of real world hacking, the uncomfortable truth that the worlds of hacking fiction and hacking reality are no longer vastly apart. This is made all the more important when we consider that with advancements in technology turning the Science Fiction into reality everyday it is only too obvious that the world of cybercrime and hacking will only continue to develop and evolve. If hackers have the power now to launch attacks on pillars of security like the Pentagon with current technology, the potential hacking power of the future seems a terrifying prospect.

 

Reference List

Cowen, Nick, “Watch Dogs is a wake-up call on internet security,” The Guardian. 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/07/watch-dogs-video-game-internet-security-ubisoft> Accessed 18 November 2014

Mosendez, Polly, “Glenn Beck Thinks ‘Watch Dogs’ Video Game Is Creating a Population of Hackers,” The Wire. 2014 <http://www.thewire.com/technology/2014/05/glenn-beck-thinks-watch-dogs-is-creating-a-population-of-hackers/371946/> Accessed 18 November 2014

Watch Dogs Game Theory Part 2: The Dark Side of Hacking

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3A9Iu-E80-w

In this second part of Game Theory’s analysis of Watch Dogs, the destructive nature of hacking is brought to the foreground, with in game examples including the destruction of steam pipes and although the video overlooks its presence in the game, one of the main antagonists in the game is killed by the player hacking his pacemaker. A concept that again seems to be farcical but as demonstrated by real world hackers such as Barnaby Jack, the threat of medical implants being targeted is a reality with hundreds of thousands of people who rely on either a pacemaker or an insulin pump at risk from a hacking attack that will not result in something minor such as bank accounts being hacked, but will instead result in death. In short if the vulnerability of medical implants is not dealt with, hackers would have the power to transform these life saving devices into ticking time bombs. However this video does not just deal with the threat that hackers pose to humans but also how hackers have the power to impact on a scale larger than simple identity theft or hacking bank accounts, but rather the ability impact large scale institutions and facilities such as the cyber-attack on the Pentagon in 2008 and the Stuxnet attack on an Iranian Nuclear Facility in Natanz that reportedly destroyed one fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin out of control. Finally, the video deals with one of the most historic incidents of hacking in the modern era with the 1982 Siberian Gas Pipe explosion caused by the CIA booby-trapping a piece of valve control software that was stolen by the KGB with a logic bomb, that resulted in an explosion that the video states was one fifth the strength of an atomic bomb.

Whereas the first part of the Watch Dogs series of Game Theory looked at the reality of the hacking within the game, this second part takes a far darker turn and shows how dangerous hackers can become and how the damage they can inflict goes far beyond victimless crime and can in fact result in vast amounts of destruction. For the final blog of this assignment I shall be looking at the reaction towards Watch Dogs has generated in regards to how it portrays hacking especially given how it has come under fire for purportedly being a tool to learn how to become a hacker despite the constant reiteration form Ubisoft that is a just a simulation.

Reference List

Basu, E. (2013) Hacking Insulin Pumps And Other Medical Devices From Black Hat [Online] Available at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericbasu/2013/08/03/hacking-insulin-pumps-and-other-medical-devices-reality-not-fiction/ [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Calburn, T. (2008) Pacemakers Vulnerable To Hacking [Online] Available at http://www.informationweek.com/pacemakers-vulnerable-to-hacking/d/d-id/1065618 [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Gardner, D. (2013) Hacker found dead just days before he was due to demonstrate how to kill someone fitted with a pacemaker at conference [Online] Available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2379009/Barnaby-Jack-dead-days-demonstrate-kill-fitted-pacemaker.html [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Kelley, M. (2013) The Stuxnet Attack On Iran’s Nuclear Plant Was ‘Far More Dangerous’ Than Previously Thought [Online] Available at http://www.businessinsider.com/stuxnet-was-far-more-dangerous-than-previous-thought-2013-11?IR=T [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Knowlton, B. (2010) Military Computer Attack Confirmed [Online] Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/technology/26cyber.html?_r=2&ref=technology& [Accessed 10 November]

Robertson, J. (2012) McAfee Hacker Says Medtronic Insulin Pumps Vulnerable to Attack [Online] Available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/mcafee-hacker-says-medtronic-insulin-pumps-vulnerable-to-attack.html [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Russell, A. (2004) CIA plot led to huge blast in Siberian gas pipeline [Online] Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1455559/CIA-plot-led-to-huge-blast-in-Siberian-gas-pipeline.html [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Watch Dogs Game Theory Part 1: The Reality of Watch Dogs

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tNPXoydz_zQ

Looking at how the media portrays the reality of hacking can be found in alternate forms such as YouTube videos such as this example from the channel The Game Theorists. Although this video is aimed more towards educating through entertainment, there are still plenty of real world examples that are referenced in regards to the reality of the hacking in Watch Dogs. Furthermore, whilst this may not be the most academic of sources, it is very well researched and in fact adds further detail beyond the examples of hacking that are shown in Watch Dogs to portray the capable reality of hacking as being beyond what is shown in fiction.

For each example of hacking that Watch Dogs portrays, this Game Theory video provides a well-researched real world example that matches, examples that I will include references for within this post. However, the video does not simply stop at explaining the reality of the hacking within Watch Dogs, but also explores other avenues of hacking that would seem far-fetched but are in fact completely possible, such as the hacking of a car, an issue that can be made all the more important given projects such as Google’s driver-less cars seem to be paving the way for the future of the automotive. Furthermore Watch Dogs also raises the issue of privacy and monitoring with every NPC (non-player character) within Watch Dogs having their own small bio that provides information on the employment status their yearly earnings (which also make them key value targets for hacking their accounts for money in game which is then retrieved by simply hacking one of the numerous ATMs throughout the game world with the single push of a button) and in some cases reveal sensitive information such as HIV Positivity. Furthermore every security camera can be hacked within Watch Dogs which are also include as side objectives known as privacy invasions which provide sneak peeks into people’s homes and lives in a way akin to the Global Surveillance carried out by the NSA that Edward Snowden released to the world.  Now although Watch Dogs is a game this issue of privacy being hacked has already occurred numerous times, with the perhaps the largest event being the Celebrity Nude hack that occurred in September of this Year and the damning testimony of former NSA agent Edward Snowden. If you combine this with the prevalence of Social Networking and University lead research projects such as Place Raider then this system within Watch Dogs is again more believable than farcical.

The question that must be asked then is how have Ubisoft been able to create a game where the portrayal of hacking is not far-fetched but rather grounded in reality. This comes from the consultation work carried out by Kaspersky Labs (a leading private IT Security company) who have repeatedly stated that the game does not actually teach people how to hack it is simply a simulation, however it is a simulation that is as authentic as possible in order to portray hacking in a way that Igor Soumenkov (A Security expert at Kaspersky Labs) describes as allowing players to “experience how powerful a hacking tool could be.”

This pursuit of authenticity made by Ubisoft has created a game in Watch Dogs that shatters the fictional façade of hacking and instead can be used to open the eyes of the world to a form of crime that is both present and rapidly growing. In the next blog entry I will be examining the second part of this mini YouTube series which explores the darker side of hacking that is portrayed in Watch Dogs. A dark side that shows the how truly dangerous hacking can be and how it can be used as a tool of murder.

Reference List

Barry K. (2011) Can Your Car Be Hacked? [Online] Available at http://www.caranddriver.com/features/can-your-car-be-hacked-feature [Accessed 6 November]

BBC News. (2013) Profile: Edward Snowden [Online] Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22837100 [Accessed 9 November 2014]

Crandall, D., Kapadia, A., Rahman, Z. and Templeman, R. (2012) PlaceRaider: Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones

[Online] Available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.5982v1.pdf [Accessed 8 November 2014]

Dark Government. (2012) Place Raider: Photo Taking, Cellphone Spyware [Online] Available at http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/place-raider-photo-taking-cellphone-spyware/ [Accessed 7 November]

Lyne, J. (2014) 14 Year Olds Hack ATM In Lunch Hour – How It Happened [Online] Available at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jameslyne/2014/06/11/14-year-olds-hack-atm-in-lunch-hour-how-it-happened/ [Accessed 13 November]

Paganini, P. (2014) Two 14-year-old students hacked an ATM with impressive simplicity [Online] Available at http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/25616/hacking/2-14-year-old-hacked-atm.html [Accessed 5 November 2014]

PR Newswire (2014) Ubisoft Consults Kaspersky Lab to Authenticate Watch Dogs Script [Online] http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/ubisoft-consults-kaspersky-lab-to-authenticate-watch-dogs-script-260900921.html [Accessed 10 November]

Prigg, M. (2014) Has New York’s traffic light system been HACKED? [Online] Available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2617228/New-Yorks-traffic-lights-HACKED-technique-work-world.html [Accessed 5 November 2014]

Robot, M. (2014) Ask the expert: Watch Dogs vs Reality [Online] Available at http://blog.kaspersky.co.uk/watchdogs-expert/ [Accessed 23 October 2014]

Security Week Video Channel (2010) SecurityWeek.Com – Barnaby Jack Hacks ATM At Black Hat [Online] Avaliable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwMuMSPW3bU [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Simonite, T. (2013) Watch the ATM Hacker at Work [Online] Available at http://www.technologyreview.com/view/517621/watch-the-atm-hacker-at-work/ [Accessed 10 November 2014]

Blog Introduction

Welcome to my blog assignment for my third year criminology module on Globalised and Organised Crime. In this blog I will be taking a look at how the media visualises and portrays the issue of hacking. As an overall rule, hacking has most often been portrayed in the media as a part of the realm of science fiction with films such as The Matrix, and the Animated Film Ghost in the Shell. However as has been seen recently with the rise of the hacker group Anonymous and more recently the celeb photo hacking scandal in September, hacking is in the here and now it is no longer in the realm of fiction but in reality.

Given this prevalence of hacking both in the worlds of fiction and reality I also aim to discover how closely linked these two realms are in terms of their accuracy of portrayal. I say this in the sense of how real has our hacker science fiction become? In order to do this I will be using one of the most current and modern examples of hacker fiction and comparing it to the capabilities of modern day hackers using a variety of mainly journalistic sources such as video and web media.

The primary source which will be the basis of my comparison is the Video Game Watch Dogs, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in 2014. Watch Dogs is set in an alternate modern day Chicago where all of the city’s operational systems are controlled by a single super computer. The protagonist Aiden Pearce is a seasoned hacker who has the technology to hack into this system via a modified smartphone and has the ability to turn the city into a weapon of vigilante justice to avenge the death of his niece.

Although this premise may seem impossible, that no amount of hacking prowess could give someone that amount of access to a city’s infrastructure. What I will show in this blog is that not only is the truth sometimes stranger than fiction but it can also be more terrifying.