The science fiction teachings of cybersecurity

Some say that “reality is stranger than fiction”, however, it cannot be denied that science fiction has brought some cybersecurity lessons to life.

This genre is available in comics, graphic novels, books, series and movies such as Matrix, which are characterized by talking about hypothetical future scenarios, where inevitably there is always the technology involved.

Although most of them have dystopian stories in which machines are revealed to humans, there are some more hopeful ones where everything ends in the best possible way.

Being so closely related science fiction with technology and the future, on some occasions they have made successes such as the 3D projections of Back to the Future. From that same, they have left a reflection on cybersecurity, which according to ESET, are the following:

The main teaching is that of Agent Smith, the main villain of this story (beyond the machines) begins being functional to the system, taking care of maintaining order within the Matrix. But after being defeated by Neo in the first movie, turns into a computer virus: capable of self-reproduction by infecting different humans and programs.

Beyond behaving like a virus, allows you to understand how another type of malicious code works: botnets. These infect several computers centrally controlled by a cybercriminal.

They seek to take advantage of the full potential that infected computers have to carry out malicious actions together such as Denial of Service attacks, malware distribution, among others.

Agent Smith replication is worthy of this type of malware, as they all work like a sort of centralized “collective conscience” that works based on the wishes of its controller. To “defeat” the botnets it is not necessary to be Neo, but to keep operating systems and applications up to date and not download unknown files.

Inspired by Issac Asimov’s robot reports, places humanity in 2035, where humanoid robots, governed by three fundamental laws that prevent harm to humans, perform various assistance tasks and represent 1/5 of the population.

Everything appears to be running smoothly until a Chicago detective, Del Spooner (Will Smith), who pursues Sonny (Alan Tudyk), a robot suspected of murdering his owner and creator.

However, they end up teaming up and discovering that VIKI, the Artificial Intelligence supercomputer that is the core that controls all robots, has developed its own logic in which robots must take control of everything to protect humans.

The teaching is that technology can help multitask but human assistance will always be needed and that in cybersecurity everyone (companies and homes) must learn about security practices to be able to control any unforeseen event.

This classic from the 80s on time travel in a DeLorean car invites reflection on the importance of doing the right thing. backup, Well, when Marty goes to the past and changes many things in that dimension, when he returns home, things also change and he sees the impact he had (which can be good or bad).

That confirms the need for configure the information correctly now, so that in the future there is not the slightest chance that something will go wrong or if it gets lost along the way.

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