Cyber Security Chaos

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The mega security firm Crowdstrike which offers protection to a huge number of big users of Microsoft computers made a bad BooBoo yesterday and crashed banks, airlines, hospitals as well as my Gulag here for several hours.  We are back up and running, but appparrently at least some of the networks require the techs actually be able to physically access the hardware, which isn't always too easy to do.  They do most of this shit remotely.

The whole security thing has got totally out of hand.  Social Security just added a new layer Login.gov which requires a 12 character password as well as phone authentication and 2 keys for password recovery.  The shit is becoming so cumbersome and complex it's becoming impossible to use.

Imagine what will happen with an outage like this when there are tons of self-driving cars on the road?  Can you imagine the mess if it happens at rush hour?

Obviously also, if/when somebody wants to purposely crash the networks, if they succeed it makes it way more difficult to fix.  The best hack would be to scramble the security software itself.  You probably could render the whole system unfixable.  No way to get back in to make any changes.

Every day that goes by I become more nostalgic for the good old days.  Of course I realize with financial information you need security, and yea online shopping is great but we did get along OK back when you called an 800 number and gave your CC# over the phone to pay.

Computers probably will die from security before they die from lack of juice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et

Global IT chaos persists as Crowdstrike boss admits outage could take time to fix

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What I think is demonstrated here is that it's plain obvious now how fragile the system controlling our society has become with its increasing dependency on the complex system of interconnected computers.  Then when you consider this will be exponentially greater as AI systems are introduced as another layer on top of this layer, it doesn't matter if it's a "rare" occurence.  Forget 1 in 100, even if your failure rate is 1:10000000, if that 1 failure is catastrophic, all those wonderful benefits you claim for the rest of the time are wiped out.  It's like a Nuke Meltdown, all it takes is one failure at Chernobyl and you wipe out the neighborhood in a 50 mile radius for generations.  The computer systems are doing so many operations every day with so many code updates, failures are baked in the cake.

Imagine a software glitch update like thiss happening when Elon has a million Robotaxis on the road and a line of code that was supposed to control the brakes slipped into the accelerator module.  Or how about when they start replacing Air Traffic Controllers with AI systems?

The Chinese already drop Kill switches into cell phone chips that wwe KNOW about.  Every time you drop a new App on your smart phone that asks if it can make changes to the op system, there's an opportunity for some nefarious code to be inserted in your machine.  That code can go and replicate to other machines.  A well designed virus could probably shut down the whole banking system in na nanosecond.  If/when we have a big enough conflict with the Ruskies or Chinese, you gotta figure an attack on the networks would come quick.  Hell, even the North Koreans and Iranians have some good Code Jockeys who went to MIT or Stanford.

My recommendation is you shouldn't install a smart toilet. Hopefully you'll still be able to flush when the net crashes.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/business/crowdstrike-tech-nightcap/index.html

The global tech outage showed how we're just one mistake away from chaos

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