Julia Roberts in a scene from Sam Esmail's film «Leave the World Behind» Photo: Netflix
For anyone who remembers Government leaflets 1980- 'Protect and Survive' and Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden's recent advice may have sounded familiar.
While visiting Porton Down Defense Laboratory as Minister for Disaster Preparedness, the country's «Doomsday Czar» issued an update on how to survive Armageddon in the digital age.
It seems hiding is no longer enough in the cupboard with a supply of baked beans, as “Protect and Survive” was the advice in the event of a nuclear attack. Today's apocalypse, Mr Dowden warns, is just as likely to be a cyber attack, so old-school radio also becomes essential.
“The world has changed beyond recognition, and our society is heavily dependent on digital infrastructure,” he said. “In the past, everyone could have access to a battery-powered FM radio. How many people actually have such a communication device now that is independent of digital and electrical devices?
If Mr Dowden's warnings aren't enough to make you add FM radio to your Christmas list, you might change your mind if you watch Leave the World Behind, Netflix's new film about a catastrophic cyberattack. (Warning: Spoilers follow.)
Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as the Sandfords, a New York couple who take their children on a vacation to Airbnb in rural Long Island looking for a 48 hour break from phones and screens. They're getting it in spades as malicious cyber forces begin to disrupt more than just Wi-Fi.
First, a giant oil tanker crashes into the beach where they are sunbathing, its GPS navigation system malfunctioning. The mobile phone network is then cut off, as is the signal on the fancy flat screen TV. Meanwhile, rumors spread of a massive power outage back home in New York. At least that's what they hear: without the Internet it is impossible to get news. Instead, their only information is a vague, analog-style message repeated on television warning of an unspecified “national emergency.”
As America's Internet superhighway turns into a dead end of error messages and egg timer symbols, the real-world consequences become increasingly dire. Airliners are falling from the sky. Tesla's self-driving cars are running out of control, creating gigantic crowds of people. To make matters worse, the Sandfords' teenage daughter, Rose, complains of feeling «incredibly anxious» about not being able to watch Friends, the cool 1990s show she streamed. It's a nod to a safer, pre-digital time, and also a sign of how internet-dependent many Gen Zers are.
Scene from film «Leave the World Behind» Photo: Netflix
The film, directed by Sam Esmail, has already topped Netflix's global charts and has been compared to a cyber version of Neath, the harrowing 1983 BBC drama about a nuclear attack on Britain. It also features a number of other apocalyptic scenarios, such as a microwave weapon that causes victims' teeth to fall out, and disruption of animal migration patterns: geese fly in the wrong direction, deer act strangely, and flamingos land in a swimming pool. But how realistic is this? Are such horrors safely confined to the realms of Hollywood? Or can they really happen?
The answer—with some troubling qualifications—is broadly “No,” according to Jake Moore, a former police cybersecurity expert who works for ESET, a major European cybersecurity firm. However, he would still be more than happy if Mr Dowden made it mandatory viewing at the Downing Street crisis response COBRA meetings.
“It's a fantastically made film and everything that makes people questioning their own cybersecurity is a huge benefit, whether for personal or business purposes. Is such a scenario possible? Theoretically yes, but it would be practically impossible to disable so many completely separate networks at the same time.»
This is perhaps the central idea of the film — and, indeed, how most people imagine a major cyberattack in which the entire Internet will be completely destroyed. However, it is based on the analogue-era assumption that the Internet itself is like a single computer with a plug that can be pulled. In fact, it consists of countless independent hubs serving different countries, governments, cities and businesses, all of which will have to be shut down at the same time.
Julia Roberts in the movie “Leave the World Behind” Photo: Netflix
“For example, Meta (Facebook) stores its data on seven different sites, so if something affects one of them, it won't affect all of them, and here you're only talking about one large private firm,” Moore says. “It would be more effective to target a firm that has a lot of pies, such as Sky, which provides TV channels, news services, the Internet and a mobile phone network. But there will be internal firewalls between these services, and even if you switch off Sky, you will still have many other providers.»
The only known way to knock out a country's entire electrical grid is with an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, says Lisa Forte, co-founder of Red Goat Cyber Security. During the first nuclear bomb tests, scientists noticed that high-altitude explosions could distort the Earth's magnetic field, creating power surges that knock out street lights and fuse boxes nearly 1,000 miles away.
The U.S. government estimates that one a large nuclear bomb detonated 250 miles over Kansas could knock out all of America's electrical power. But while many world powers are now secretly developing specialized EMP weapons that do not require the raw explosive force of nuclear weapons, none are yet considered capable of crippling more than a few square miles of infrastructure.
Another disturbing scene in the film is when the Sandfords try to return to their home in New York, but come across a crowd of thousands miles of wrecked Tesla cars. A hack into Tesla's sat-nav forced them all to drive to the same location, accelerating to top speed at the last minute (the Sandfords' car was almost hit by several new arrivals speeding down the road).
This plays into long-standing concerns about self-driving cars malfunctioning — although given how important safety is to the competitiveness of its products, Tesla is not complacent about the risks. Like many tech companies, it offers so-called «Bug Bounties» — prizes for any hacker who can identify weaknesses in a car's cybersecurity.
“Technical people generally like to point out things that are wrong, and they do it either for reward or simply because it’s the right thing to do,” says Matthew Haynes, a former British military officer who runs the cybersecurity firm Askari Blue. «Tesla is also releasing much of its source code so people can identify any vulnerable bugs in it.»
He notes that Tesla will also have undisclosed security features in its cars, all of which will have to be hacked separately . But among cybersecurity professionals, the rule is: “there is no such word as unhackable.”
Mahershala Ali in the film “Leave the World Behind”, photo: NETFLIX
For example, one theoretical problem with self-driving cars is the “poisoning of the data set” they use to recognize and obey traffic signs. These cars typically use machine learning to feed them, say, one million different real-life images of a 40 mph speed limit sign, taken from every conceivable angle and in different weather and visibility conditions.
«If the hacker then added a photo of the same 40 mph sign, say with a green square sticker on it, with instructions for the car to read 100 mph, then he could then stick those stickers on various random signs and cause chaos,” says Haynes. “But this will require a complex hack, as well as physical work.”
Luckily, some of the film's other storylines seem to fall firmly into the realm of science fiction. It is not known how to change the direction of the Earth's magnetic field, which migratory birds are believed to use as a compass. And while sonic crowd-dispersing weapons already exist, none are capable of deafening an area the size of Long Island, as happens in the film.
It is also not known that any such weapon can cause people's teeth to fall out — the horrific fate of the Sandfords' teenage son, Archie. The film blames the episode on «Havana Syndrome,» a reference to the mysterious headaches and ailments that American diplomats suffered at their embassy in Cuba in 2016.
Mahershela Ali, Mihaya la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the film “Leave the World Behind” Photo: NETFLIX
American investigators initially thought the diplomats may have been targeted by long-range microwave weapons that created small, concentrated areas of pressure in brain tissue. But the credibility of Havana Syndrome has since been questioned, and earlier this year a US intelligence assessment concluded there was «no credible evidence» that a hostile actor was involved.
However, Forte fears that developed countries such as Britain still have weaknesses in their national infrastructure, and that «we've probably survived so far by luck in the sense that it just hasn't happened.»
Particularly vulnerable, she said, are devices created in the 1990s and using electronic technologies from a more innocuous era, when no one expected organized cyberattacks from nation states. «Things like modern railroad signals and some hospital systems, which can cause a lot of problems if hacked, often use 1990s industrial control systems that are inherently insecure,» she says.
Alarming the alarm sounded in 2017 when 60 NHS trusts were hit by the worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack allegedly carried out by North Korean hackers. This denied hospitals access to patient records and forced some to divert ambulances to other facilities, although no patients were injured.
Investigators later accused NHS managers of failing to carry out basic software security updates. But it remains to be seen whether lessons have actually been learned. Parliament's National Security Strategy Committee recently warned that the UK remains at «high risk» of a catastrophic ransomware attack on public services that could «bring the country to a standstill.»
However, as Moore points out, a cyber hacker doesn't have to shut down the entire digital infrastructure to cause civilization to crumble. Instead, it could simply target bottlenecks in the system, such as contactless payments, which can cause huge queues at ATMs and supermarkets. The Covid lockdown, which saw fights break out among panicked shoppers, was a glimpse of the chaos that could ensue. As one former British M15 executive said: “We're only four meals away from anarchy.”
Indeed, after the WannaCry attack, while Moore was still with Dorset Police, he sat on the steering committee advising the county on on how to deal with a major cyberattack.
“A lot of it was about protecting things like food supplies and water supplies, which can quickly lead to civil unrest if they're not accessible,” he said. «You even have to think about things like toilet paper roll.»
Admittedly, a film about a global toilet paper shortage might not create the same dramatic storylines as «Leave the World Behind.» But it shows how even the most mundane, everyday aspects of life can be exploited by targeted cyber hacks.
So in addition to that FM radio, also consider a few spare rolls of Andrex for doomsday. buffet. Plus a large stock of old-school DVDs, including perhaps a Friends box set. Then I hope you survive The Place Where Cybergeddon Strikes Everyone.
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