Cyber Threats Increasing

Well, we had an outage on Friday from a large number of services. Their Windows computers were all crashed because they were using a security package from Crowdstrike. It conflicted with Windows and caused the “blue screen of death”. Keep in mind that Crowdstrike is the service that the DNC (under HR Clinton) hired to claim that Russia interfered with the elections in 2016, and set things up so the Democrats could claim that Trump was getting help from Russia.

Aside from questions of technical competence and political biases, it’s important to note that this is a symptom of things to come. A major issue we are likely to face is the rising failures from dependency on outside agencies.

All of those companies needed to contract with some outside agency to secure their corporate networks and the Windows computers they ran. It’s simply the way things are. Most companies simply do not have internal expertise for this stuff. It’s way too complicated; security requires software that gets its hooks deep into the internals of Windows because that’s what the attackers aim at — the obscure internals that very few people understand. They all chose a very famous cyber-security outfit with a big reputation, but it turns out Crowdstrike wasn’t being careful enough.

Their stock plunged a bit on the market and several big customers have dropped them, most famously Elon Musk at X. That’s a lot of business they lost. It wasn’t a cyber attack; they broke it themselves.

The basic model of Windows is excessive complication in order to do all the fancy things people like, while keeping some measure of control out of the users’ hands. You are just using it; you don’t own it. In recent years, more and more of the system you use is not in your hands; less and less is even on your own machine.

This kind of threat is a part of what I’ve been working on myself since about Thursday. Once again, I’ve ditched Windows. I could cite all kinds of personal reasons why I was so unhappy, but that really doesn’t matter. Those are just little things that got my attention. What really struck me was the dependence on outside agencies for every little thing. At one point this past week, an attack hit my Win11 laptop and there was no real defense for it. There might be ways to avoid it, but that would mean not visiting certain sites as part of my research.

There are a lot of people out there offering information that isn’t mainstream. They can’t get mainstream service, so they are using what they can find. Often they find services that are just using their traffic as a means to swindle others. Sometimes it’s fraudulent advertising, but it’s more often data gathering that can be accumulated to discern how to manipulate — tracking that is increasingly intrusive. The default cyber-security response is to keep you away from that stuff.

That’s not good enough for me. I have to be able to follow my convictions, which means reading obscure stuff to see what people are thinking. I need to be able to chase the dark corners of the Net safely. So, you guessed it, I’m running Linux again (Linux Mint to be precise). While I can still use MS Office online, I’m keeping a local copy of everything. I’ll be ready at the drop of a hat to open things in Libre Office should MS Office go down.

Understand this: Google has already cut people off for saying controversial things. Other services have done it. Most of those services are “free” in the sense the user doesn’t pay directly. I’m paying for a multi-user Office 365 account. So far, Microsoft hasn’t censored me, but it may be just a matter of time, given the polarization of socio-political activities out there.

Minor prayer request: I still need tractor paper for my printer and it’s hard to find without paying $100+. Surely someone somewhere has a box they can no longer use.