Cyber lunacy

This feeling has been coming over me for some time now, but it has intensified this past summer when I realized that my despair over how computers/the internet/cyberspace has been fulfilled. The United States in particular and the world in general is severely threatened by vulnerabilities we all created with our insane desire to have computers make our lives easier and less labor intensive. For sheer convenience we have all ceded our safety, freedom, and independence — and potentially even our lives — to insidious artificial intelligence and cyber piracy.

If you just look around you can see that World War III will not involve nuclear weapons or invasions by armies of soldiers in tactical gear. No, the leading edge of war – the front lines – will be manned by computer nerds with pocket protectors and algorithms who will shut down every bit of infrastructure, cripple every business sector, shut off all the lights, block all forms of communications, stop every vehicle and essentially bring every aspect of life and society to a screeching halt.

There won’t be any bloodshed – there won’t need to be. We’ll all just starve or freeze to death, or die of boredom because Google or Siri or Alexa won’t answer any more of our insipid queries.

I am not exaggerating or fear mongering. The threat is real and so is the blasé, ho-hum attitude of the general public every time there is a minor skirmish – unless it happens to you directly.

Look at this past summer’s brouhaha over the “blue screen of death” on PC computers worldwide when a little known company called CrowdStrike allegedly sent out a regular – but this time flawed – software update that brought airlines (especially Delta), hospitals, banks and even some government offices into complete chaos, with ripple effects stretching out for days. But look around. Barely a week goes by where there isn’t even more malicious cyber attacks on businesses, governments, hospitals, schools, communication networks, and more that demand millions of dollars in ransoms be paid via Bit Coin before the attackers will free up computer systems and allow normal operations. The nation’s car dealers were hit in June; Microsoft two weeks after Crowdstrike; AT&T has experienced outages several times; and, health care providers are popular targets. No one –no company, no person, no government, nothing – is immune.

Is there really any difference between a mistaken software update or malicious “bad actors” when it comes to shutting everything down? The answer is, of course, no. They all point out – time after time after time ad nauseam – that everything, and I mean everything, is vulnerable to attack. And just as the world’s militaries have long practiced war in simulated war games, I am quite sure that our own government, and the governments of our enemies and potential enemies, are at this moment simulating complete cyber space shutdowns in cyber war simulations in preparation for the inevitable Virtual Apocalypse. You don’ think “Russian Hackers” are not state sponsored? Very naïve.

Many things come to mind, of course, but chief among them is how we all blithely just leave it to CrowdStrike or Microsoft  or the latest obscure cloud company that pops up when these events happen to just handle it themselves. We trust that business executives, the marketplace and the courts are the best places to solve and further our cyber advances. But clearly we need more protections in the form of laws first and then the decentralization of cyber space systems so that there won’t be a full interconnectivity that will be easier to attack and succeed in shutting down. The Grid, as it were, needs to be broken up into many smaller parts. Also –and this is important given the past few flaws and hacks – we need analog backups so we can at least minimally function. Plus, we need people who understand analog.

And the public needs to wake up and demand better. We are one errant or intentional binary code from much more than the Blue Screen of Death. We should all be outraged.

It is absolute lunacy that we talk all the time about cyber security and how best to increase it. We should be talking about cyber survival. Now.

Jeff Rundles is a former editor of ColoradoBiz and a regular columnist. Email him at [email protected].