Scenarios for crime and terrorist attacks using the internet of things

Abstract

The Internet of Things is a paradigm in which everyday items are connected to the internet and share information with other devices. This new paradigm is rapidly becoming a reality in the developed world, and while it holds an immensely positive potential, it also means that criminals and terrorists would be able to influence the physical world from the comfort of their homes. We can expect that hackers, ransomwares, viruses, spywares and many of the other woes of the internet today will migrate to the internet of things as well. In this research we used General Morphological Analysis and brought together fifty experts on an online platform to develop novel scenarios about the crimes and terrorist acts of the future. The experts developed 21 scenarios, which were then ranked according to their plausibility. We provide a brief description of every scenario, and focus particularly on the four most plausible ones: blackmailing by connecting to smart homes, gaining insider information from wearable devices and using it for financial gains, assaulting a smart city through the internet, and performing sex crimes via connected items in the smart home.