14 DAY TRIAL // I know that many of you have paid in advance to play Watch Dogs on your PCs, but you are still not able to do that despite the fact that the game has already been launched for at least 24 hours.
However, the fact that Ubisoft’s services are not on par with the success of its products is not our concern for now. Instead, I would like to focus on what Watch Dogs is all about and how that applies to real life.
As many of you probably know by now, Watch Dogs’ protagonist, Aiden Pierce, uses a smartphone loaded with sophisticated software to hack everything that’s both electronically and mechanically controlled.
You may be wondering how that is possible. Well, it appears that in the not so distant future, the city of Chicago is completely networked and the infrastructure is monitored and controlled from one gigantic and very complex operating system called CTOS (Central Operating System).
Imagine what a person could do if it manages to hack into the system. Basically, it would have access to all the information stored on the huge server and could bend the rules to his/her own needs.
For example, Pierce can hack into most of the city’s ATMs and draw huge amountS of cash, or it can identify a person by simply focusing the smartphone’s camera to their face.
He can play with the traffic lights or disable a car’s alarm if the smartphone finds a vulnerability in the software, and it usually does.
Hackers often use smartphones to illegally access private information
All that I have described above may sound futuristic, but we’re living it right now. Aside from the fact that no major city relies on a single massive server, operating system to control its infrastructure, everything that’s presented as “possible future” in Watch Dogs is real.
Not a day goes by without a group of hackers attacking certain websites, databases, or government institutions. With the rapid technological advancement occurring in the last couple of years, the number of cyberattacks has increased exponentially.
Hackers use just about any gadget at their disposal in order to get access to sensitive data. The smartphone that helps Aiden Pierce hack into Chicago’s mainframe computer is not in any way more sophisticated than today’s handsets.
These days, sadly, it’s not a big deal to listen to other people’s phone conversations and record them using another smartphone.
One of the newest hacking-related things that you can do with your smartphone, assuming that you have the right software installed, is tampering with the traffic lights. This is possible right now, but requires the hacker to stay at a certain range in order to be successful.
I bet the procedure will be “improved” in the coming months, so anyone with certain knowledge could switch traffic lights with their smartphone while driving.
Smartphones may soon replace PCs as main hacking tool
Talking about ATMs, it appears that these days, you only need to hack someone’s computer in order to stole his/her bank account information. You don’t really need to hack an ATM, though that has also been proven as very possible.
But what about using your smartphone to hack a city’s operating system and cause a major blackout, or desynchronizing that city’s automatic timing for traffic lights or public transportation? That could really paralyze an entire city and could cause real disasters.
The more powerful smartphones become, the more frequent they are used by hackers in their illegal activities. That will never change, so people need to learn how to protect their personal information, as there will always be someone that wants to take advantage of your gullibility.