Let’s start this piece with a cold, hard, punch of truth: humanity is destroying itself. No, it’s not because you actually printed an email last week. In fact, it’s probably not your fault at all. The imminent destruction is beyond your control. Usually, giant problems which pose an existential threat to our society have solutions, or at the very least are spoken about in the news. Unfortunately, our mainstream news is mostly dominated by how trans women should not be allowed to play sport, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for:

1. Ransomware attacks: a lucrative business which stops hospitals from working and will probably shut down EV charging networks one day (fingers crossed).
2. Intense computational tasks at scale: mining Bitcoin and training AI is making the Earth hotter but I guess let’s just keep doing it??
3. Space debris: we’ve encased ourselves in a sheath of high-speed bullets, woops!

🕵️ Ransomware attacks

A ransomware attack is when some quite literally takes your data for ransom by encrypting it and then demanding money. Hackers have been making companies look like fools for years via ransomware. As such, ransomware is becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, leaving us all vulnerable and clueless. Why does no one seem to care? My educated guess: the field of cybersecurity is perceived as a boring place for paranoid white men to congregate and discuss endpoints. We must do all we can to fight this silly (but partly true) sentiment.

☝️ Time for some facts: a cybersecurity firm called Black Fog (the names of these firms are very off-putting and also part of the problem IMO), have released a State of Ransomware report for 2021, which details key attacks that took place in every month last year, and also shows us which sectors and countries were most affected. Next to governments, healthcare and education seem to be worst affected, with the finance sector being the least affected. Ahh that makes sense... if anyone deserves to be ransomwared it’s educational facilities and hospitals, and definitely not hedge funds etc.

I honestly wouldn’t care about the current state of ransomware so much right now if it wasn’t very clearly a lucrative, heartless endeavour. In the old days it was common to leave a malicious script running and hope that it produced a few hundred dollars a month. Well — that’s how LOSERS do it now. Those who make it big in ransomware nowadays engage in the following:

• Focussing efforts on specific targets who will much more likely give a huge payout (some call this ‘big game hunting’ which is dumb but ok)
• Understanding that ransomware is a business, and if different groups work together, they can share the large payout. E.g. have you heard of ‘Exploits as a Service’?.
• Favouring techniques that actually do not use malware, but rather stealing credentials and entering systems legitimately, which is much harder to catch.

This is exactly how the infamous SolarWinds attack was pulled off. It was what is referred to as a ‘supply chain attack’ where even software update mechanisms — e.g. the things that people trust to protect them against this sort of thing — were compromised. Here’s a quote from the linked article:

“Software supply-chain attacks are not a new development and security experts have been warning for many years that they are some of the hardest type of threats to prevent because they take advantage of trust relationships between vendors and customers and machine-to-machine communication channels, such as software update mechanisms that are inherently trusted by users.”