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The article is not talking about car bombs. It's talking about attacks like "make every car of model X that's currently on the road accelerate to 120mph and th
by bzbarsky 9y ago
The article is not talking about car bombs. It's talking about attacks like "make every car of model X that's currently on the road accelerate to 120mph and then ram the nearest wall". This would kill a number of people on the order of magnitude of the number of cars of model X in existence (assume each one only kills one person, the driver), but even that can easily be on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions. For example, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Corolla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Corolla there were 40 million Corolla's sold over the span of 47 years, which means there are certainly model years out there with close to a million vehicles sold.
- Zigurd 9y agoMore than 250 million Windows PCs are sold every year and the installed base is over 1.5 billion. The largest botnets number in low single digit millions, or less than 0.5%.
- bzbarsky 9y agoThis is an interesting data point, and I agree that it's hard to explain. Why doesn't a newly-discovered 0-day in Windows lead to pretty much every internet-connected Windows PC being infected? (That said, there are issues around actually reaching these machines, because a lot of them don't have routable IPs and may not load your attack web page. Similar issues may arise for cars, which sure would be nice as a mitigation.) Even so, 0.5% of 1 million is about 5000 people. Not quite WMD territory, but also way out of typical "car bomb" territory... Maybe the mitigating factors would mean the actual fraction would be even less. But it would be nice if we didn't have to hope so.