Planes dropping out of the sky. Your mobile rendered useless, just like your car. As a Netflix film portrays a nightmare that security experts insist is a very real prospect… How will YOU survive on the day an enemy state switches off the internet?

An oil tanker ploughs into a tourist beach. Planes fall from the sky. Driverless cars run amok. The internet fails and the mobile network dies. Feral instincts take over as people fight for food, water and medicine amid the ruins of civilisation.

That is the nightmare vision depicted in Leave The World Behind, Netflix‘s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple battling societal breakdown when the technology that underpins civilisation collapses.

It’s fictional, but it touches on deep-seated, real-life fears.

The film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama‘s company, Higher Ground. The ex-president was closely involved in shaping the plot, which dramatises many of the cyber-security issues on which he was briefed during his eight years in the White House.

For our 21st-century lives are almost entirely dependent on complex technologies that many do not understand — and that can so easily be exploited by our enemies.

Maintaining a car, for example, was previously a job for any competent motorist and their local mechanic. Now our vehicles are computers on wheels, their inner workings a mystery.

We used to navigate with paper maps and landmarks. But with his car’s satnav out of action, Ethan Hawke’s character Clay Sandford is unable even to find his way to the nearby town.

Our telephone system used to run on sturdy copper wires, with handsets you could fix with a screwdriver. Now it is a branch of cyberspace.

So, too, is finance. Remember when a credit card’s embossed number left an imprint on a paper slip? Not any more. Our payment system depends wholly on electronic encryption.

What use is cash in the modern world? In the film, with the internet gone, it becomes a prized asset.

If the technologies we rely on break down, many of us will be as helpless as Hawke’s Clay Sandford. ‘I am a useless man,’ he howls, as the crutch of technology is kicked from underneath him.

A media studies professor, Clay is perhaps the epitome of modern professional cluelessness, bereft of the hands-on skills needed in a post-apocalyptic world where only the fittest can survive. A world in which oil, gas and electricity supplies have ceased, in which the taps have run dry, where supermarkets are empty, looted shells.

In this wasteland, communication is only face-to-face, the fastest form of transport is a push-bike and modern healthcare is a distant memory. Our electronic devices, once indispensable, are no more useful than paperweights.

So could it really happen? The harsh truth is that modern life is perilously fragile.

We are just one weekly shop, one tank of petrol, away from helplessness, starvation and death. How did we become so vulnerable?

The internet was created so that academic computers could connect with one another. Today, it is the central nervous system of our civilisation. It has brought untold benefits to our lives and the global economy — but our failure to think about security means that this miraculous progress has come with dangerous flaws.

It is often hard, sometimes impossible, to identify other people with whom you are dealing online. This leaves the internet wide open to abuse from pranksters, fraudsters, terrorists, spies and hostile states such as North Korea, Iran, Russia and China. And you don’t need to turn to Hollywood to see what this means in practice. Ordinary instances abound.

For a start, when we receive an email, we cannot be sure that it is genuine. ‘Spoofing’ a sender’s address is child’s play. So is creating a bogus website. This is a boon to fraudsters and other crooks who try to steal our money or personal information.

Another example is the ‘Hi, Mum’ messages in which ‘children’ claim to have lost their phones and need help from a parent in paying an urgent bill. In fact, the money goes to a fraudster.

These particular scams are so increasingly sophisticated that criminals are now using artificial intelligence ‘deepfakes’ to mimic the voice of their victim’s loved one. Yet fraud is just a small part of this sinister universe.

On a far bigger scale is ransomware, in which attackers scramble vital databases to extort money from victims.

Such attacks are crude but effective. They typically begin when someone unwisely clicks a link in an email. That enables ‘malware’ — malevolent software — to infect the victim’s computer and its connected networks.

Crooks will, for a price, then supply an electronic key that unscrambles the vital data. The ransom payment is, of course, made in untraceable cryptocurrency. The attackers do not care if they are putting careers, happiness, health or even lives at risk. They are interested only in financial gain.

Last October, one such attack crippled the British Library. The ‘Rhysida’ cyber-gang claimed responsibility and leaked private employee data — including passports and addresses — while demanding Bitcoin cryptocurrency to the value of £600,000.

Hospitals and local authorities are also common targets due to the sensitivity of the information they store. In 2020, Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council resorted to using pen and paper after ransomware froze its files. And then, on another scale altogether, are the terrorists and hostile states who use similar software for political gain.

Ultimately, the full-scale societal collapse depicted in Leave The World Behind is — from a technological standpoint — somewhat overblown.

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