Article originally featured on modmd.net, redistributed with author's permission

One of the major considerations when making the decision to become Complex is the full gamut of security concerns. While Cybernetic Augmentation (CA) can cause Perception Interruptions, Infections (both biological and digital) and Emotional Distress, these are well explored risks covered by the media almost weekly. But there is a massive disparity between the reporting of CA risks and the actual impact of risk factors. The single greatest statistical risk factor to becoming Complex is with hacking.

As long as there has been CA, there have been security blunders. Even when CA was merely prosthetic, there were firmware hackers that could cause disbalance in appendages by altering the physical outputs of digital values, either making numbers give a greater response or a decreased one. A Firmware Tremor was a type of virus that could be downloaded, sometimes just by VIC transmission, that would cause a tremor in the prosthetic, forcing the user to have the prosthetic cleaned or fixed.

Quickly manufacturers bundled together patches for existing CA and boasted tremorless appendages with their next deployment of products. This use of term tremorless was not an accident either. It was intended to give the public the idea that it was a manufacturing flaw and not a security one. This entire dance was just a bandage, the deeper lesson not being learned by the industry.

For the following 20 years, new exploits would be found, exploited, patched and PRed away. Security was, and still is, a second-order citizen. White Hat firm Mas0ns just did a report (which you can read here) about the exploits found in the newest generation of CA releases from nearly every manufacturer. I want to take a moment to discuss one such exploit in greater detail.

Remote Access Sleep Paralysis (RASP) is a form of sleep paralysis caused by a hacker getting into the Nerveworks of a contemporary CA and causing an impulse that interrupts the voluntary muscle controls of the victim.