Could Terrorists and Hackers Harm Us Through Our 3D Printers?

[LucaS]

Scenario 1. Imagine an industrial 3D printer used to manufacture something to be used in a building structure. Eg. a pillar.

This pillar should conform to certain features, eg. it should be so and so dense and be able to withstand this amount of weight, etc.

Now, a hacker changes the model, the 3D printer creates a pillar that looks ok from the outside, but that is actually hollow. Or perhaps the materials mixture isn't as it should be. Or it has some other type of defect that would make it unfit to pass the safety checks. If the safety checks are indeed inaccurate and/or avoided and/or tampered with, that pillar could one day collapse. And part of the building with it.

Scenario 2. Doctors use a 3D printer to manufacture a prosthetic implant, part of a bone, a vital medical implant, you-name-it. Hackers, again, insert some kind of malware that changes all models by decreasing the density of each manufactured object from, say, 1 to 0.8. The doctors don't notice the change because the (malware-tampered) software says everything's okay. A million medical implants get produced, shipped to hospitals and implanted. A few years later the first ones start to break down...

You know, cyber-terrorism connected to 3D printing doesn't necessarily mean exploding printers.

L.

P.S.
Feign, in order to be hacked a printer doesn't need to be online. Stuxnet was introduced into the Iranian computers with a USB key.