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Murder by numbers

Shashank Joshi: defence editor, The Economist

A cyber-attack could deliberately kill someone in 2021

2021 in brief

March 5th is the 75th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in
1946, in which he likened the Soviet Union’s growing influence after the end of the
second world war to an “iron curtain” descending across Europe. The speech heralded
the start of the cold war

LURID SCENARIOS of cyber-killings go back decades. In 1999 the New York Times raised
the prospect of an “electronic Pearl Harbour”. In 2011 Leon Panetta, then America’s
secretary of defence, suggested that “the next Pearl Harbour...could very well be a
cyber-attack,” perhaps one “as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11”. No such
deadly, large-scale cyber-attack is known to have occurred. But in September 2020, an
attack shut down the computers of a hospital in Düsseldorf, and a woman who needed
urgent surgery died after being transferred to another city. This, the first known death
as a result of a cyber-attack, appears to have been accidental: the attackers meant to
extort money by targeting computers at Düsseldorf University, not its associated
hospital. But it shows that deliberately causing death in this way is certainly possible. It