Futuristic hacking techniques revealed

Science fiction author Jack Dann will take centre stage as the keynote speaker at Gartner’s upcoming security conference in Sydney.

Jack Dann, distinguished author and editor, is set to take the audience on a futuristic voyage to a time where everything, including a human being’s personality, can and will be hacked.

By sharing the skills he’s attained as a science fiction writer, his aim is to invoke the minds of the very professionals who are fighting fires today so they can aptly foresee and prepare for future security threats.

“I want to show them how science-fiction writers do it. I’m going to try to give everybody a space to think about the possibilities that are really down the road. I want to extrapolate all the wild possibilities,” said Dann.

In one example, Dann bypassed today's virtual gaming and virtual identity phenomenon and landed at a time when personalities could be digitised. He asked, "What happens as it gets more and more virtual?"

"There will be a time where we can probably upload our personalities, and you could be obviously hacked. We’re not even thinking about this stuff while new generations are taking privacy for granted.

“Look at cloud-computing," he said. "If we’re keeping everything out there on the cloud, then everything is [also] there to be hacked and it will be,” he warned.

In an exclusive interview with SC, Dann said technology is changing the world so extraordinarily fast that change needs to be anticipated because what people think is weird today [actually] went out-of date yesterday.

Fast forward to a time when artificial intelligence is the norm, what will stop those devices from getting hacked? He asked.

“If suddenly we create computers that are intelligent, if it’s self-aware, who would say it would do what we tell it to do? [Eventually] everything could be self-aware.

"We need to be open to it as our tools change the way we do things and perceive the world ,” he said.

Commenting on Jack Dann as Gartner’s keynote speaker, Andrew Walls, research director at Gartner Australia said, Dann will demonstrate how security professionals can take their skills and knowledge to build models of the future and how to accommodate to those new models.

“[Gartner] tries to help clients develop a capability of anticipating change and anticipating future trends, that’s a lot of what our clients turn to Gartner to do.

"Science fiction writers are people who specialise in doing exactly this sort of thing,” said Walls.

He added: “What’s important is for the security person to know what’s happening everywhere in IT, what’s the future of IT going to be and what controls and mechanisms do I need in place to help my organisation manage its security.”

The Gartner IT Security Summit will be held at the Sydney Convention Centre on September 23-24.