Several years ago, Vint Cerf visited the Guardian in his capacity as Google’s “evangelist in chief” – the kind of Silicon Valley title you can carry off only if you have invented the internet, which, luckily for Cerf, he had.
It’s been just two months since researcher Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware.
PALO ALTO, Calif. — In late 2013, an A.T.M. in Kiev started dispensing cash at seemingly random times of day. No one had put in a card or touched a button. Cameras showed that the piles of money had been swept up by customers who appeared lucky to be there at the right moment.