Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
The new documentary Billion Dollar Heist ends with a jolting premonition: In the next five to 10 years, a cyberattack threatening major national infrastructures—banking, transportation, telecommunications, water supplies—is all but guaranteed.
The warning comes from Misha Glenny, a London-born cybersecurity expert and the author of the 2008 book McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (later adapted into a TV series starring David Strathairn and James Norton). Glenny appears in the film to help outline the eponymous saga, through which a cabal of hackers committed the most ambitious digital heist in history, pilfering $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank. If someone could get away with a crime of that magnitude in 2016, there’s worse around the corner, Glenny argues, especially as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated.
“It’s a permanent black-swan situation,” Glenn tells The Daily Beast, referring to a common theory of probability. “You have a low risk of something bad happening, but if something bad does happen, then every year the consequences are going to be even greater because of the scale of our dependency on complex, networked computer systems.”