"Anything connected to the Internet can be hacked"

This is what Matan Sharaf, strategic consultant of the Blavatnik Multidisciplinary Center for Cyber ​​Research and the Jubilee Na'im Workshop for Science says as part of a study evening on the occasion of the publication of Lior Tabansky and Yitzhak Ben Israel's book - Cybersecurity in Israel 

"Anything connected to the Internet can be hacked." This is what Matan Sharaf, a strategic consultant of the Blavatnik Multidisciplinary Center for Cyber ​​Research and the Yuval Na'im Lada workshop, says as part of a study evening on the occasion of the publication of the book by Lior Tabansky and Yitzhak Ben Israel - Cybersecurity in Israel.

Sharaf, a self-described hacker who advises cyber security companies and is a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. In his lecture he gives inspiration from the world of coffee to the cyber world.

Not many know but the first IOT device was a camera that was placed in 1991 and transmitted three pictures per minute of the only coffee machine in the office of a company that installed the first ATMs connected to the network. It was a large building with many corridors and the thing that upset them the most was that they make it all the way to the machine and find that there is no coffee or water in it. The first webcam operated for ten years, and its disconnection sparked a wave of protests.

Even today, the coffee industry is at the forefront of the IOT. For example, Mr. Coffee released a coffee machine that has a sensor that can measure whether there is water in it or not, a screen that displays the necessary messages for the user, a controller - an electronic component that controls the grinder, sensors that can measure temperature and pressure. and electronic control switches in case of software changes. And it also has Bluetooth and WIFI connections that allow you to control the machine from your smartphone. On top of that, the company has a cloud service that automatically orders the beans from Amazon, when the machine reports that they are about to run out.

Are these products secure? Not necessarily. Here, for example, Samsung has built a smart refrigerator that has a screen on the door with the calendar and expected tasks. In one of its corners there is a device that when a malfunction occurs you attach the phone to it and it transmits to the technicians (in Israel, in Petah Tikva) what broke down and which parts the technician should bring with him. The problem - this device is not protected, and this opening may be hacked and the hacker can extract the username and password from there, in this case for Outlook.

Hacking into cars has become a national sport with good hackers who advertise it so that the car companies will repair the necessary repair. Thus, a few weeks ago, a hacker broke into the computers of a Jeep Cherokee and managed to divert it from the road. The Jeep company had to call all owners of these vehicles to update software. Imagine if a bad hacker did that to you? This gets even worse when there will be autonomous cars.

And not just cars and coffee machines. All ICS systems - industrial controllers, systems controlled by software-based mechanisms can be hacked and cause problems.

The conclusion, of course, is that we need to build security solutions, but we also need to overcome the major failure in protecting against cyber-attacks involving the human factor. If we return to the example of coffee, Nespresso took a complicated process of dozens of ingredients and summed it up in one capsule and one push of a button. Any computerized solution must adopt this method, certainly cyber security solutions. The system should make most of the decisions and perform quality control.