Imagine trying to get your driver's licence or passport renewed, only to be told you are dead.
Australian computer security researcher Chris Rock, of Melbourne-based IT security firm Kustodian, has shown this scenario to be entirely possible thanks to a major flaw in the way several state governments register deaths in Australia.
Appearing at the infamous annual Def Con IT security conference in Las Vegas this week, Mr Rock demonstrated gaping flaws that have surfaced in the rush to go digital with the process of registering births and deaths in Australia. 
Speaking to Fairfax Media via phone after giving his presentation, titled "I Will Kill You", Mr Rock said a malicious person could theoretically use the flaws to kill themselves off to get their life insurance money paid out, or go after others for retribution.
A person targeted by a fake death might not even know they were declared dead until doing an activity like trying to renew a driver's licence or passport, he said.
But it wasn't just deaths that could be registered; he also found it was possible to create non-existent babies that could be used for malicious purposes such as money laundering once they reached adulthood.
Given it would take 18 years for a criminal to make use of such a person, Mr Rock said he saw the flaws as a potential form of investment that criminals could use to create non-existent people for shady activities.
"You could use a virtual person to commit a crime and if that virtual person gets caught you could put them into bankruptcy," he said.
He was "completely shocked" at how easy the process had been made while researching the topic over the past year.
"They're not even making an attempt to secure it," Mr Rock said, referring to governments the world over not securing their systems.
"I could kill anyone in any state," he added.
The process of declaring someone dead in Australia typically requires a doctor and funeral director's sign off. While this previously required paper-based forms, states such as Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have moved to online systems. These systems don't require log-ins and typically only need a doctor's name, practising address, and registration number in order to verify a doctor's identity.
The problem? All of these details are available on the publicly accessible Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency website so patients can verify their doctor is legitimate, meaning a hacker could impersonate a doctor with ease.
While some "doctor speak" was required to fill out the forms in order to avoid circumstances that might trigger the need for investigations into unnatural deaths, online guides were available to ensure red flags weren't raised, Mr Rock said.
The second step of registering a death ??? a funeral director's sign off, which includes how they plan to dispose of a body ??? is also able to be faked by impersonating a funeral director, Mr Rock said.
Alternatively, a malicious person could sign up to become a funeral director in Australia, which requires very little paper work.
Mr Rock said he actually did this by making a website for a bogus funeral home and used that to support his application for an account as a director. He got an automated email a few days later saying he was approved.
While Mr Rock understood why the process had been made easy ??? to ensure accurate records that don't have illegible handwriting ??? he said the systems were open to people doing malicious activities with them.
"The reason the systems are so easy to use is because governments want accurate, centralised death records and accurate birth records," Mr Rock said.
"They don't want doctor handwriting where there are errors, and they want the records quick so that if there is a mass mortality they can get quick death records."
While he said he never went through and "killed anybody off", he did consider it.
"I thought about killing myself but I could think of nothing worse than starting again with a tax file number and company registration and all that sort of stuff," he said.
"I went through all the formal logic. I saw the online medical form. I then interviewed doctors in Australia to find out who fills out these forms and how it works. I then looked into the funeral industry.
"I've spent probably a year on this."
Mr Rock said he began looking into the death industry a year ago after Victoria's Auburn hospital accidentally declared 200 patients dead.
"I really had no interest in the death industry and it wasn't until I saw that news article, which caught my eye that they had obviously gone through an online process," he said.
"In my head [I thought that] traditional doctors were filling out a certificate of death and then that would go to the funeral director and obviously the next of kin would get a death certificate."
Clearly that wasn't the case, he said.
The Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages holds about 14 million records and each year adds 77,000 births, 37,000 deaths, 29,000 marriages and 11,000 change-of-name registrations.
But even if one particular state's system was secure, another state's less secure system could be used to register a death of a person from another state without raising suspicions, Mr Rock said.
Mr Rock has detailed his work in a book called The Baby Harvest: How virtual babies became the future of terrorist financing and money laundering.
Asked if he had disclosed any of the issues to the various government bodies, he said he hadn't as the issues were a global phenomenon.
Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, which was highlighted in Mr Rock's presentation, has been contacted for comment.
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