The Internet is on fire | Mikko Hypponen | TEDxBrussels

the beverly hills country club was a nightclub and a restaurant a huge one it could seat up to 3 000 people every single night people who would come to enjoy multi-course dinners and watch first class entertainment on the 28th of may in 1977 a 19 year old guy called walter bailey was working at the beverly hills country club as a waiter and around eight o'clock that evening walter was stopped by another waiter who asked walder if if he knew where the owners of the club are and walter didn't and he asked why and the other waiter told him that there's a small electrical fire in one of the rooms in the center of the complex so he's trying to find the owners and walter got interested and he decided to investigate so he left his ballroom where he was serving and he went to the center of the country club towards the room which had the fire and as he was getting closer to this room he could see that there was smoke pouring out from the top of the door that led to the room so he realized that there's a big fire inside the room and he was clever enough not to open the door instead he returned back to his ballroom the complex had multiple different ballrooms and the one where he was serving in had over 900 people seated down so he went there and he found his boss and he told his boss that there's a fire in the building and we have to evacuate this room and his boss was just looking at him blankly and now you have to understand there were 900 people seated down there and these people were celebrating things like their weddings there were multiple wedding parties in the audience like brides in their wedding dresses there were people celebrating their 50th anniversaries or 50th birthdays with their families watching entertainment and drinking and enjoying the food and then walter saw that there was actually a queue of people who were still coming into the room so he went to the queue and he told them that everybody follow me and then he walked this cue through different corridors out from the complex to the courtyard and he told them please wait here and nobody didn't even ask him why they were just following orders but as walter returned to his ballroom to his horror he saw that everybody was still sitting down the band was still playing people were still ordering cocktails and then he decided to act he thought to himself that i'm going to get into trouble over this but nevertheless he climbed to the stage he took the microphone from the singer of the band he told the band to stop and then he addressed the crowd he told the crowd that everybody listen up if you look on your right side there's an exit in the wall over there if you look on your left side there's an exit in the wall over there and in the back there's one more exit everybody stand up right now and leave the room and that's what people did they followed orders and that night the kentucky country club burned to the ground the ballroom that walter the 19 year old walter evacuated was engulfed in flames in 10 minutes from the moment when he took the mic walter saved hundreds of people there were other people in the complex who weren't so lucky over 165 people died that night in that fire but that story reminds me of our own actions today in our lives today in our digital lives today because our lives are moving more and more to the online world and we are seeing things going wrong in our online world and very few people are taking action and we hear a lot of talk talks about things like the big brother or big brother society but i'd like to actually quote a late futurologist and a fellow finn mika mannerman who in his books wrote a lot about the future and he wrote about how he actually doesn't believe in a big brother society he's sort of more believing that we will be entering a some brother society a society where there's always someone watching not necessarily the big brother not necessarily the government but someone and he also made the note that we are living an aquarium life where we have no walls or we have walls but they can be seen through now some of this some brother watching mentality can be seen from the actual action of governments for example during just this year in our labs at f secure we've analyzed five malware families which we believe to be coming from the russian government malware like sandworm and cosmic duke which have mostly been found from ukraine where which is a country in the middle of crisis right now or malware like hoviks which is the first malware we've seen since stuxnet that's actually trying to find and fingerprint factory automation gear and we believe these are coming from the russian government and then we have the chinese government in fact the very first targeted attacks launched by any government anywhere in the world we ever saw were coming from the chinese government and that was more than 10 years ago and exactly a year ago i was on this very stage speaking to you about attacks right here in brussels about attacks targeting local telcos attacks that we now understand much better a year later we understand them much better for example we now know exactly where these attacks were coming from they were coming from the uk intelligence from gchq we also know which exact malware was being used in these attacks it's a piece of malware called regin which we believe was developed together with the british intelligence and the u.s intelligence and we learned much more about the targets of these attacks because there was they were they were much more targets than just what we knew a year ago we for example know that this malware and these operations launched by the uk intelligence we're targeting academics here in belgium professors people like that they were also targeting targets in austria including the iaea the international atom energy agency in austria now we also know that one of the largest amount of targets anywhere in the world were in ireland which is a good indication of who's behind the attacks like who's interested in ireland well united kingdom is interested in ireland and it's quite remarkable when we have a situation like this where fellow eu countries are launching active governmental funded mulberry attacks against fellow eu countries but that's where we are today but there are parties which are trying to fight back the u.s government tried to gain access to the data of several of the silicon valley companies a couple of years ago one of the companies was yahoo yahoo tried to fight back those attacks and these attacks are actually very similar to the attacks we've been seeing just now in germany this guy is ali fares he works for a company called stellar which is a german telco company german telecommunications provider which provides connectivity over satellite links der spiegel magazine did an investigation in which they found out that once again the british intelligence had been breaching telcos in europe in this case the network of stellar so here we have a video clip of the der spiegel journalists going and meeting engineers at this stellar company and showing them files leaked by edward snowden files which prove that stellar their own company has been targeted and hacked by british intelligence they are now seeing for the very first time these slides which lists their own company among the targets which have been hacked by uk intelligence agencies then they are shown another slide which lists the targets like the names of the engineers in the company and they see their own names listed in this top secret file they just now realize that they personally have been hacked so returning back to yahoo yahoo tried to fight the u.s government they didn't want to give access to their customers data and this fight was happening in a secret court there are such things secret courts in the united states it's the so-called fisa court or foreign intelligence surveillance act court in which a lawyer from yahoo was trying to defend the users of yahoo against the u.s government and the judges in the court made interesting comments for example one of the judges was claiming that there could could possibly be no damage to the customers of yahoo since this surveillance will be secret which means the customers will not know that they are being watched so how could possibly they have any damage because they will not know that they are being watched and he was actually right this actually stood based on the u.s law and yahoo's case was thrown out and this was then used as a legal precedence to do similar surveillance against other silicon valley-based companies as well so let me quote a friend of mine aral balkan from inditech he made a great comment about how private used to mean something completely different private used to mean something where you would go with your friend just the two of you where there's no one else and you would speak in private that's what it used to mean well today in the online world private doesn't mean that for example when you're on facebook and you send a private message you don't actually send it to someone else you give it to facebook and facebook gives it to your friend this is sort of like you would tell your private message to your creepy uncle and then the creepy uncle would tell it to your friend right that's the equivalent and the largest creepy uncle we have on the net is google google who sees exactly what we're doing what we're thinking google who provides excellent and great services we all use them and what's even better these services are free which is remarkable when you consider how big a company google is and how expensive their operations are in fact google spends every quarter roughly two billion dollars into their data centers they're investing every quarter over two billion into building larger and larger data centers yet the services that they provide are free and what's even more remarkable google is profitable they make 12 billion dollars profit every year which nicely illustrates that there is no such a thing as free that's how valuable our data is to google there are no free lunches there are no free search engines there are no free cloud storages there are no free webmails the only things on the net which really and truly are free are things like you know linux kernels like open source projects most of the things which are called free are not free for example apps there are no free apps we know that all the app stores are filled with free apps none of them are free and you see this when you go and download something simple you know an application which will turn your phone into a flashlight or a torch and then when you take a closer look at what kind of rights or permissions it requires from your handset it wants to know your location and gain access to your contacts and and and to the internet of course why would a flashlight need that there is no free lunch there are no free apps so it's easy to blame the user the users are making stupid mistakes i heard a good story about users about this guy who had an old desktop computer at his work and he got a new computer so he wanted to move his files from the old computer to new computer so what he did is that he uh he went to his my documents folder and with his mouse he selected all his files then he right clicked and selected copy then he disconnected the mouse from the computer connected to the new computer and clicked paste and that's not a stupid user that's actually obviously a very smart man who simply hasn't had the training i mean it could work like that it just doesn't and another thing users do is is that they lie what is the biggest lie on the internet well the biggest lie on the internet is that i have read and i agree to the license agreement we all do this we know you all do this because we actually tested this we set up a free wi-fi hotspot in london earlier this year so you got free access to our wi-fi hotspot but of course you had to read through the end user license agreement to get the access and in our license agreement we had a slight clause which said that you will have to give your firstborn child to us and everybody clicked okay now we didn't actually go and pick up the first born child i think we really should have you know go through the doors and hello we've come to pick up jamie and we didn't do that and we have to accept license agreements today even when we use our devices like our smart washing machines or smart doorbells or our smart tvs let me tell you a secret when you hear that the machine is smart what it actually means that it's exploitable smart means exploitable smart tv means an exploitable tv smartphone means an exploitable phone and so on that's what it means and these devices when you go and read their license agreements have surprising things so for example the samsung smart tv explains to you that this voice recognition feature in your tv will record what you speak around the tv so please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or sensitive information it will be recorded by your television in your living room or if you're playing a game of football with your xbox and if you happen to swear when the computer scores against you it will actually record you swearing in your living room and will give you warnings because you swear in your living room this is sort of like having the creepy uncles in our gaming consoles and inside our television sets we are living an aquarium life or a great thing that happened with the new iphone which now has this health app which tracks your health and one user notice that he was tracking his steps so he asked a question online like okay it's counting my steps i actually never enabled this how do i how do i stop my phone from counting my steps and the answer was that actually it's been counting your steps already from iphone 4s it just never showed it to you before and obviously if it hasn't been a problem to you before how come it's a problem now and there's no way to disable it and there are people who will tell you that there's nothing you could do about these things there's nothing that could be done so you shouldn't even try to do anything at all and i don't believe in that i believe that when we see things going wrong we should stop and even though we might think that this will get into us trouble we should act i hope we have the strength and guts to act i hope i have the strength and guts to act i hope you have the strength and the guts to act when things go wrong i hope you have the strength and guts to think that this will get me into trouble but when needed i hope you are the one who will stop the band and grab the microphone thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 237,971

Keywords: Belgium, Computer Science, ted talk, ted, ted x, tedx talk, ted talks, Public Policy, tedx, English, Global Issues, tedx talks, TEDxTalks

Id: QKe-aO44R7k

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 06 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Madsy9]

Wow.. being an employee at a company and see internal NSA slides with your name and colleagues in it must be incredibly creepy.

[u/trai_dep]

Mikko is a world class cyber criminality expert who has led his team through some of the largest computer virus outbreaks in history.

Prepare for what is becoming his ‘yearly’ talk about PRISM and other modern surveillance issues.

[u/yolakalemowa]

great presentation. Now about the last word... "act"

how?!! What??!!

That's what I need to know!

[u/Gcc95]

10:00-11:12 holy shit