Marc Goodman Credit: Photo by Dan Gentile

When everything from your refrigerator to your DNA can be hacked, how do you protect yourself?

In his SXSW Interactive panel Future Crimes From the Digital Underworld, security expert Marc Goodman didn’t claim to have all the answers, his goal was to get people to start asking more questions.

“We’re not going to solve these problems by burying our heads and pretending they don’t exist,” said Goodman.

Marc Goodman Credit: Photo by Dan Gentile

So to get people’s attention, he came to Austin armed with an impressive array of criminal anecdotes from his recently released book Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable. From the Mexican cartels’ nationwide encrypted phone network, to UK drug dealers’ use of heat-sensing drones to find their competitors marijuana grow-houses, to an internationally coordinated hack on debit cards that let criminals withdraw $41 million in 10 hours.

“Crime used to be a one-on-one affair. It was a good business model: be your own boss, set your own hours, but your business didn’t scale,” said Goodman.

Technology is lifting restraints of scale and allowing the bad guys to function more like businesses. Malware companies are so corporate that they have customer-support lines. Dark Web drug marketplaces are streamlined such that dealers get Yelp-like reviews. And as these enterprises scale, so do the amount of niches where they can wreak havoc.

“The internet of things is just more shit to hack,” said Goodman.

So how do you protect all that shit? Goodman recommended a six step method called the Update Protocol that should reduce your personal vulnerability by 85%, but for an exponentially expanding technological world, he thinks our problem-solving needs to scale as well. Specifically with a massive Manhattan Project cyber security research center to address everything from international cyber-warfare to potential robot uprisings.

Because should Watson ever turn to a life of crime, we need to be able to hack it.

Future Crimes From the Digital Underworld

Saturday, March 14, JW Marriott

Keep up with all our dispatches from SXSW at austinchronicle.com/sxsw or follow our Festival alias at @ChronSXSW.

This article appears in March 13 • 2015.

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