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New Zealand's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 25th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.

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Silent Spring (the tech version)

22 September 2015

One of the most important books ever published is Silent Spring written in 1962 by author Rachel Carson but today's column isn't about the birds and bees of which she wrote.

In her book, Carson wrote about the effects of insecticides on the cycle of life so essential to our own survival and how this would, unless unchecked, eventually result in a world which fell silent for lack of birds and pollinators.

Well today I'm talking about a different kind of silent spring but one which would be almost as devastating to billions of people around the world.

I'm talking about the day that your mobile phone no longer rings.

The catalyst for today's column is the increasing likelihood that some piece of malware will cripple the vast majority of mobile devices we carry about in our pockets. Devices on which huge numbers of people have become incredibly dependent.

The first hint at this possibility was the revelation that a bug in almost all Android devices (the Stagefright vulnerability) made them potential targets for malware.

Now I read on today's wires that hackers have created a fake version of critical developer code for the iOS system called XcodeGhost and thus infected a number of apps on Apple's App Store.

It would seem that, with increasingly regularity, evil little sods are finding clever ways to gain access to our mobile phones, tablets and other portable devices.

Right now they're just playing around and little harm has been done... but what happens when a real zero-day vulnerability is cunningly exploited to cripple billions of phones around the planet?

Given the way in which mobile devices operate -- linked in a global network via the cellular system or WiFi, a well-defined piece of malware which can exploit a suitably large vulnerability could, at least in theory, proliferate at a rate that would boggle the mind.

If you thought the Spanish Flu decimated the world -- imagine a digital analog of this which could spread at one million times the speed of a physical virus.

Perhaps a really clever bit of malware wouldn't even announce its arrival on your phone. Instead it may just tuck itself away in a corner, watching and listening to your every action and conversation -- remitting that very valuable information to a server somewhere.

A few weeks later, fraud on a massive scale could be conducted using the many passwords, credit card numbers and other identifying data that had been collected. Within a few short hours, the evil little sods behind such malware could steal enough money to set them up for life.

So how much of a blow would we be dealt if, within just a few short days, all our mobile devices fell silent -- crippled by a piece of malware?

The hit on productivity would be huge.

The sense of "disconnect" felt by many people who now rely on being constantly "in touch" with their social network of friends would be immense.

However, on the up-side... we could dine at a restaurant, go to the movies and generally get back to enjoying life without the irritating buzz, ring or melodic tones of someone's cellphone blasting forth at the most inopportune moment.

If our mobile devices were brought to their knees by some evil malware, it could create the most pleasant "silent spring" -- for those of us who so fondly remember the pre-mobile world.

Just what are the risks of such an event taking place? Should we prepare for the inevitable global malware outbreak that cripples our phones and tablets - albeit temporarily?

Can you update your Facebook page by telegram I wonder?

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