The world crossed a red line this month when police directly tied a woman\u2019s death to a cyberattack in Germany.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors in the German city of Cologne have opened a negligent homicide investigation in the case in which an ailing woman was turned away from a hospital in the grips of a ransomware attack and couldn\u2019t help her. She died on the way to another hospital.<\/p>\n
It was the most concrete evidence to date of the real-world consequences of digital hacking. And it\u2019s a scenario that\u2019s likely to play out again and again as technology becomes more deeply entwined in people\u2019s daily lives and security protections fail to keep up.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something people have been warning about for a long time now and you\u2019re going to see more and more of it,\u201d Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank who focuses on cybersecurity, told me.<\/p>\n
The case is especially noteworthy because after years of fears about potential life-threatening cyberattacks from Russia, Iran or North Korea that could resemble a \u201ccyber 9\/11\u201d or \u201ccyber Pearl Harbor,\u201d the first attack directly linked to a death came from common criminals who may not even have known they were targeting a hospital.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the hackers who locked up the hospital\u2019s IT systems seem to have been targeting Heinrich Heine University, which is affiliated with the hospital, rather than the hospital itself, according to a note the hackers sent demanding a ransom payment, the Associated Press reported.<\/p>\n
Source: Washington Post<\/p>\n