ABSTRACT
When science-fiction writer William Gibson first dreamt about what cyberspace could look like,1 he was far from imagining that his concept would become one of the most essential dimensions of our societies. Within 30 years, cyberspace evolved from a graphic representation of all computerised data in a sci-fi novel to being ‘the dominant platform for life in the 21st century’.2 From laptops to smartphones and common house appliances, the range of devices connecting individuals and enabling data transfer has not only grown exponentially, but it has also become considerably diverse. According to Europol, there were 8.7 billion devices connected to the internet in 2012, a figure that had grown to 10 billion in 2014, and is projected to increase to 50 billion by 2020.3 The Internet of Things4 alone is expected to connect 26 billion devices by 2020, according to the Digital Single Market Strategy.5 The coming into being of cyberspace and its widespread adoption have been openly welcomed and cheered, given its perceived contribution to
1 W. Gibson, Neuromancer (Harper Voyager, 1982). 2 Hammersley, as cited in P.W. Singer and A. Friedman, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What
Everyone Needs To Know (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 15. 3 Europol, ‘EC3 First Annual Report’ (2014); Europol, ‘iOCTA: The Internet Organised
Crime Threat Assessment’ (2014). 4 The Internet of Things is ‘where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into the infor-
mation network, and where the physical objects can become active participants in business processes [… and] might also serve as backbone for ubiquitous computing, enabling smart environments to recognize and identify objects, and retrieve information from the Internet to facilitate their adaptive functionality’. In other words, the Internet of Things is the capacity of physical appliances (such as an oven or a car) to transmit data within a given network. The risks associated with it were recently visible in a Wired experiment where a Jeep Cherokee was remotely hacked, leading to the recall of 1.4 million cars in the US according to A. Greenberg, ‘Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway – With Me in It’, Wired (21 July 2015), www. wired.com/ 2015/ 07/ hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway (accessed 31 May 2016); BBC Technology News, ‘Fiat Chrysler Recalls 1.4 Million Cars after Jeep Hack’ (24 July 2015), www.bbc.co.uk/ news/ technology-33650491 (accessed 31 May 2016).
