Most people probably aren’t aware of this, but the 2016 U.S. Presidential election included a candidate who had a radio-frequency identification chip implanted in his hand. No, it wasn’t Donald J. Trump. It was Zoltan Istvan, a nominee representing the Silicon Valley-based Transhumanist Party and his body-worn chip unlocked his front door, provided computer password access and sent an auto-text that said: “Win in 2016!”

The transhumanist movement – employing technology and radical science to modify humans – offers a glimpse into the marriage of machines and people, the focus of a recent paper released by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. With cybernetic implants already available to consumers, the prospect for techno-human transmutation – cyborgs – is not as far away as many may think.

“We are moving towards automation, we are moving towards machine learning,” said Parham Eftekhari (pictured), co-founder and senior fellow at ICIT. “We’re seeing it impact a lot of our society.”

Eftekhari stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at CyberConnect 2017 in New York City. They discussed ICIT’s recent cybersecurity research and the potential for increased government regulation. (* Disclosure below.)

Hacking human implants

The purpose of ICIT’s research is to examine contemporary implant devices and assess potential security vulnerabilities which could easily lead them to be compromised. Hacking machines is bad enough, but hacking human beings is a whole new ballgame.

“What’s important is to not make the same mistakes as we did the first go around…and not put profits over security and privacy,” Eftekhari said.

In addition to its cyborg research, the institute has published a number of papers dealing with topics such as security in the health sector, the dangers of metadata exploitation and how hacker groups threaten the nation’s energy industry. ICIT has played a role in bringing the commercial sector together with government officials for dialogue about critical security issues.

Concerns surrounding the lack of strong security in technology systems and devices will likely lead to increased government regulation, according to Eftekhari. “The government will be getting involved,” said the ICIT co-founder. “Ultimately it’s going to be the government beating some of these people virtually on the head until they start to do some self-governance.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the CyberConnect 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the CyberConnect 2017 conference. Neither Centrify Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE