You've waited...
And waited
AND WAITED-
Oooh! Super smash just released
NO! YOU KEEP YOUR DIRTY VILLAGER HANDS OFF ME!
Must... focus... on hackers... Theorists need to know the TRUTH...
FALCON PUNCHHHHHHHHH!!!!
*Game Theory Theme Song Plays*
DOODOODODODODODOODODODODOD
Hello, Internet!
Welcome To Game Theory!
Silly intros aside, prepare to be scared.
Two months ago - Geez, was it really that long? Yup. Yup it was.
We started a deep dive into the world of Watch Dogs - sorry, Watch-Underscore-Dogs. *Chuckle* Like I said it's been a long time.
So that I could warn you that all the CRAZY hacks that are super badass to do in the game are just plain BAD when they're actually happening to you in real life.
AND for as absurd as hacking traffic lights, ATMs, or instantly stealing identities might seem,
we showed that it's actually not that difficult. That everything from you car's tire pressure gage, to your facebook page, to the charging station in the airport,
Were vulnerabilities that the hackers were just waiting to exploit.
But if you thought controlling your car, emptying your bank account, or GOD FORBID, swiping your selfies was the worst possible invasion of your privacy,
We're not even CLOSE, duckface.
Because hackers aren't just hacking the world around you,
They're hacking the world INSIDE YOU.
And if that doesn't kill you, their control over the national power grid, gas lines, and nuclear power plants probably will.
Imagine a game in which Slenderman, Herobrine, and Ben Drowned all lived in Lavender Town.
What we're talking about today is scarier than that.
Get ready to revert to a worthless protoplasm hiding under the covers for protection.
because the fear mongering is just beginning.
In Watch_Dogs,
Hacking can do some pretty incredible things.
But one thing it can't do?
Control the human body.
And for as powerful as you might feel blowing up electric plates or raising traffic barriers,
Think of the terrifying power Aiden Pearce would have if, with one press of his cellphone, he could stop your heart.
In this instance, truth is scarier than fiction.
Consider this: the pacemaker.
A medical implant dating back to 1926, responsible for regulating the rhythmic beating of your heart.
But because it's inside a human's body, there's never been an easy way to see how the device is performing without having to SLICE a person back open and check it out.
Until now.
Pacemakers are now being made to be virtually accessible.
Which has given doctors direct access to valuable data, and HACKERS direct access to your heart.
In seconds a hacker can gain control of the device
and make it so your heart is misfiring as the pacemaker sends it repeated electric shocks out of rhythm.
It's like a scene straight out of HOMELAND.
Actually it is a scene straight out of HOMELAND
and since no one ever thought "Y'know what, maybe someone might wanna take advantage of this technology someday."
They forgot to install McAfee or Norton on the thing
making them SUPER vulnerable.
In fact, our good friend Barnaby Jack (remember him from last time?)
He reverse engineered a pacemaker to deliver 830 volts directly to the heart.
And he could activate this from 50 feet away with the stroke of a keyboard.
A real-life Deathstroke.
THANKFULLY there've been no recorded cases of a death from a cyber attack on the body,
key word there being 'recorded'.
because, let's be honest, how many public medical examiners are going to be trained for hacker tracking?
And as loyal Theorists will remember from part one of this duology, like with hackers controlling your car, all evidence can be erased remotely.
So yeah, like I said, no RECORDED cases.
And if you think your ticker is safe, tin man, just because you're not one of the 200,000 people with a pacemaker,
Think again.
As this applies to pretty much any medical implant.
Say for instance the 350,000 people who use insulin pumps.
These individuals diagnosed with-
"Diabeetus"
Thank you Wilford Brimley.
depend on insulin to help regulate the amount of sugar in their blood.
Insulin pumps are one way to deliver insulin into the body,
but again, are a relatively unsecured medical implant.
Good ol' Captain Jack
the Neo of hacking computer systems apparently,
designed something that could, with a few flicks of the keyboard, get every pump within 300 feet
to dump their entire supply of insulin into the patient's bloodstream.
You know what that's the equivalent of?
That's a SILENT BOMB planted inside your body, ready to activate at the push of a button.
OH
and I almost forgot!
The equipment needed to do this once cost thousands of dollars
Now? It's 20 bucks.
Feeling safe because you have the unique fortune of being 100% healthy?
HAHA think again FRIEND-O.
Because while you may not have a bomb placed inside, you,
you may just be standing on one.
Watch_Dogs features sections where you can use your L33T Hax0r ring to burst steam pumps hidden under the street.
Utterly decimating the road and all surrounding cars.
CHILDS PLAY! Take control of the computer system operating the pipelines,
shut down a key release valve here and there,
let the steam build up,
and... well... the game demonstrates the rest.
THAT is like, Hacking 101.
The CIA? It's already done you one better.
In 1982! That's right, over THIRTY YEARS AGO.
This is so long ago that the computer was named Man of the Year by TIME Magazine it was such a novelty.
Back then, the CIA was using cyber attacks to smite its enemies.
You see, the U.S found out that the KGB had been stealing our technology and slapping a big ol' RUSSKI flag on it.
Curse you, Nikolai Jakov of the KGB!
So, how'd we react?
By using a Trojan! Perhaps the first Trojan virus in cyber-attack history.
Slipping a bomb into the package the KGB was planning on stealing,
but not just any bomb...
a LOGIC bomb.
Basically code that makes a program switch the way it behaves after running millions of cycles.
Y'see, those millions of cycles are the fuse.
One they're done, BAM!
The logic changes and bad things start to happen.
OH and now's probably a good time to mention that thing the KGB was stealing.
A piece of software to regulate gas pipelines.
Can you guess where this is going?
10 million cycles and a few months later,
the bomb went off,
causing the gas pipelines pumps and compressors to run at dangerously high levels.
What was supposed to happen were a few leaks in a pipeline running across Siberia
What ended up happening was an explosion 1/5th the strength of an atomic bomb.
The most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever to be seen from space.
Whoops! Slight miscalculation there, huh?
And if that story gotcha thinkin'
'MERICA (hoho) YEAH!
Think again.
'Cuz 'MERICA ain't doin' any better.
In 2008, the U.S suffered what has since been known as the 'worst breach of U.S military computers in history'.
when someone stationed in Afghanistan found a stray USB device in a military parking lot
and had the bright idea of plugging it into a computer connected to the military central command.
That was all it took for the worm, nicknamed agent.btz, to take hold.
And this wasn't your usual "hamster dance" playing on loop with pop-ups filling the screen-style attack,
OHOHO No,
This worm dug its way through the system
relaying confidential information back to its unknown shadowy master.
And as it worked, it kept changing
getting stronger, evolving, like... uh... like EVOLVE!
And, like the humans in EVOLVE,
the CIA tried to keep up but couldn't.
Agent.btz kept mutating
changing its signature, making it impossible to detect.
Eventually, the U.S put together a team called Operation: Buckshot Yankee
Yes, that was the best name that they could come up with
to fight this thing but all the while the worm collected more data and opened up more backdoors
jumping in and out of the networks, transmitting everything to the mysterious figures who created it.
Official documents say it 14 MONTHS to finally put an end to it, but that wasn't the end.
Reports three years later hinted that the thing was still going,
with newer, stronger variations still appearing in the system.
The thing was like Frieza!
*high pitched* "This isn't even my final form!"
Tough nuggets, Buckshot Yankee.
Maybe if you spent more time looking for the worm early and less time coming up with stupid team names you wouldn't have problems like this.
Angry Military Guy: "Alright guys, we got a problem in the system. Time to figure out a name!"
"We got eggplant! Buffalo! Team Eggplant Buffalo GO GO GO GO GO!"
As one former computer defense scientist from the Pentagon said, "Old worms never die, they simply re-morph and rear their head again."
Makes you feel real safe when that's coming from what should be the top computer defense experts in the WORLD.
And finally, city-wide blackouts.
Playing Watch_Dogs, it was the one hacker ability that just seemed so... extreme that I couldn't believe it.
CERTAINLY one person couldn't have the ability to, at a moment's notice,
Knock out a city's worth of power, right?
Right??
June 2010
A virus named STUXNET was found planted in the networks of factories and power plants across the world.
What was it doing?
Sitting there... waiting.
Y'see, STUXNET had the ability to overwork certain devices to the point of failure.
Then disable the alert system so that the factory operators had no clue that something had gone wrong.
There'd be no one there to fix it until those small failures led to bigger ones down the line.
Like a series of destructive dominoes.
And the story most people know about is how it was used to target a nuclear power plant named Natanz in Iran.
With a goal of taking control of the plant's thousands of uranium centrifusions and spinning them out of control
and it worked!
It destroyed 1/5 of Iran's equipment and set Iran's nuclear program back by 2 years.
But here's an odd parallel that no one ever seemed to talk about.
Seven years earlier, in the U.S, 2003
The North-East experiences a MASSIVE blackout, from New York to Ohio to Canada, lasting upwards of two days.
I was actually hosting my high school's talent show at the time, so it's a pretty vivid memory for me.
The weird thing is how it happened.
The official report sounds a lot like the same symptoms as STUXNET.
Some equipment mysteriously performs over-capacity, then breaks, and no alarms go off to warn operators so no one's there to fix the problem.
Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?
STUXNET aside, there's also the story of how researchers for IBM took full control of an American nuclear station in less than a week.
A system protected, mind you, by the same system that controls everything
from water filtration plants to subway systems here in the U.S.
They said it was one of the "easiest penetrations" that they had ever performed.
Phrasing ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Let's be honest here, we're fu-YAHA-ed
For as much as I love Google and Apple and Microsoft,
Technology is evolving at such a fast rate that mistakes happen.
i's don't get dotted, t's don't get crossed, and things get left unprotected.
In fact, I'm GLAD this episode took so long to happen because in the last two months,
look at what's been in the news!
Nude photos leaked of dozens of stars as Cloud storage gets hacked
Shellshock is able to control thousands of computers,
becoming the biggest web-threat since Heartbleed,
and Heartbleed was only five months ago!
Even stupid stuff like the iPhone 6 being bendable just shows how things are getting rushed out.
Untested, as our desire for more tech can't be stopped
and manufacturers can't keep up,
and all the while our lives are getting tied more and more to machines with a four bar wifi connection.
Us gamers got all upset about the always-on X-Bone
the Kinect camera that would always be watching and listening to us 24/7 in our living rooms,
and perhaps rightfully so, but guess what? TVs on the market today now have cameras and voice recognition pre-built into them!
Making the X-Bone controversy a moot point!
'Selfie phones' are now built so that the camera is always turned onto you
How about the always on car? Your internet-ready refrigerator? Dammit, there's even underwear with a wifi connection!
Everyday we're surrounding ourselves with more technology that's more accessible,
and as a result, we are literally being attacked on all sides at all times.
The second someone wants to throw our lives into chaos,
they can with a few keystrokes.
And no amount of 8-letter passwords with at least 1 capital letter, 1 number and a special character is going to change it.
That is the world of Watch_Dogs.
THAT is our world.
And THAT... isn't a theory. It's a fact.
Well that was depressing.
LET'S TALK ABOUT SHAVING!
I know, an abrupt transition but what can you do?
I'm going to cut right to the chase
When I do these ads at the end of the videos it's only for products that I personally believe in.
And anyone who shaves should try out Dollar Shave Club!
Anyone, guys or girls!
I'm going to talk for a bit about how cool the product is now,
but seriously, just skip to the part where you click the link in the description or type in DollarShaveClub.com/MatPat into the search bar
because their motto is our blades are PIHEEE great
and not only is that hilarious, it's true.
For as low as three dollars a month, you can get a top-tier razor and blade sent right to your door.
It's awesome because it means that you don't have to go to the store and it costs, like, a quarter of the price
thereby making it the epitome of a win-win.
As a die-hard electric razor guy, I was super skeptical at first.
You think this baby-smooth face happens naturally?
NOPE!
My naturally hairless chest, yes, but give it a few days and my face starts to look like this.
But the razors they send and their shaving butter?
It's pretty awesome.
For a few bucks more you can get some uh.. butt wipes, too, which is a... bold move to say the least.
So anyways, I recommend giving them a try.
I was pleasantly surprised and I think you will be too.
And hey! One other thing.
I really appreciate you putting up with these ads.
Thanks to them, I'm able to bring on new editors, like Rider and Furst.
which means no one's going insane working on these hundred hour episodes every week
Except for the people doing the captions :'(
Seriously, it's exhausting to do week after week.
Especially from the editing side, so it really helps to spread out the work.
It also means that I get to experiment with some new projects, which I've been hinting at for a while 'cause I'm really excited and I think you will be too.
Those will be happening before the end of the year
So, that's pretty awesome.
In all, that's why these things are so important.
You get more content,
It helps me pay other super-talented guys,
and hey! Maybe you'll find a cool product or two. That said, next time we're back to the
SUPER AMAZING END CARD TOURNAMENT
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go celebrate the fact that I FINALLY completed this two-parter.
HWOOOOOOO, it's a weight off my shoulders.
*outro music plays*