Earth Day: Fighting Climate Change With Cybersecurity

One of the biggest challenges of our time is climate change. The world struggles to get our ongoing path to environmental destruction under control. Earth Day was this past weekend. This day is for most people about avoiding meat, taking public transport, using reusable shopping bags, drinking wine instead of beer, and turning lights off – but nerds can do more than that. Our biggest challenge is to reduce the climate gas emissions from transport.

Walkable cities are nice – and cybersecurity can contribute to that! Happy Earth Day 2017! Information technology has a gigantic role to play in the solution to that problem:

• Self-driving cars, buses, metros make public transport cheaper. But can they be hacked? Of course, they can.
• Smart assistants using AI to help plan your day, your travel, and to optimize your choices also with regard to environmental footprint can do a lot. But can they be hacked, thereby destroying all hope of privacy protection? Sure they can.
• Telework can reduce the need to travel to work, and the need for business travel to talk to people in other locations. This brings a whole swath of issues: privacy, reliability, etc. If people don’t trust the solutions for communication and system access, and if they don’t work reliably, people will keep boarding planes to meet clients and driving cars to go to the office.
• Cloud services are nice. They make working together over distances a lot easier. Cloud services require data centers. If the reliability of a data center is not quite up to expectations, the standard solution is to replicate everything in another data center, or for the customer perhaps to replicate everything in his or her own data center, or possibly mirroring it to another cloud provider. This may not be seen as necessary if the reliability is super-good with the primary provider – particularly the ability to deal with DDoS attacks. Building reliable data centers is, therefore, part of the climate solution – in addition to providing data centers with green energy and efficient cooling systems.

OK, so DDoS is a climate problem? Yes, it is. And what do cybercriminals need to perform large-scale DDoS attacks? They need botnets. They get botnets by infecting IoT devices, laptops, phones, workstations and so on with malware. Endpoint security is, therefore, also, a climate issue. Following sensible security management is thus a contributor to protecting the environment. So in addition to choosing the bus over the car today, you can also help Mother Earth by beefing up the security on your private devices:

• Make sure to patch everything, including routers, cell phones, laptops, smart home solutions, alarm systems, internet connected refrigerators - the whole lot.
• Stop using cloud services with sketchy security and privacy practices. Force vendors to beef up their security by using your consumer power. And protect your own interests at the same time. This is doing everyone a favor – it makes AI assistants and such trustworthy, making more people use them, which favors optimized transport, consumption, and communications.
• Prioritize efficient, safe, and secure telework. Use VPN when working from coffee shops, and promote the “local work global impact” way of doing things. Being able to avoid excessive travel, whether it is to the office or to a client on the other side of the globe, your decisions have an impact. Especially if you manage to influence other people to prioritize the same things.

Happy Earth Day 2017. Promote climate action through security practices!