Penning in to avoid hacks
Use paper, pen and pencils and you’ll avoid hackers
Iheard a fine and increasingly commonly used statement the other day from a head-shaking bloke. “It surely can’t get any worse,” he said with the rattle of his jowls.
This was followed by another increasingly well-used response from the other chap in our midst.
“Of course it can…and it bloody well will,” he growled.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” was all I could frowningly say quietly. And we all kind of nodded.
For this is 2021… the age of cybersailing.
And cyber-leakage and cyber disabling and cyber disinformation and cyber hacking.
Before I continue on this cyber discourse (and before the computer freezes up again) I need to give a nod to a fine, if slightly “out there”, American band of a few decades back called Devo.
They saw the writing on the wall way back then and dubbed themselves with a name which veered far away completely from that of “evolution”.
For while we were evolving rapidly in the arena of technology, particularly on the computer front, we were equally devolving in terms of failing to slow down and
acknowledge, and deal with, the potential downsides.
Oh no, that would have been poor form.
One had to march forward, and quickly.
Like the Devo lads, I suspect we may be going backwards in the respect of cautiously embracing the best of evolution, inventions, upgrades or whatever.
Because the more we change things, and the more we create and disperse things, the more (you know what) gets the chance to hit the fan.
“Oh no… the computer’s frozen,” is a common term these days right up there with “oh no… there’s only one can left in the fridge” and “oh no…t he kids must have broken it”.
But these cyber-frosty moments are at the bottom end of the scale.
At the top end is that evil thing
called cyber hacking.
And it is now well and truly international cyber hacking — computers in New Zealand schools, hospitals and business have been targeted in recent months by cyber bandits from far, far away.
In fact I don’t think we even know exactly where for they have remarkable skills in being able to stay very well hidden.
Overseas, some big budget organisation systems have been momentarily melted (and as a result required massive rebuilds and alternative restructuring) due to the “work” of silicon-brained heaps of ransom-seeking creatures whose lives evolve (in this case not devolve) around the corruptive pursuit of hacking into the computer world.
And for some reason, despite the fact there are many, many more cyber good guys out there than there are cyber bad guys, the bad guys somehow manage to stay one step ahead.
You create it, you install safeguards and monitoring systems, and they’ll just climb over them and wander in.
In terms of evolution the sin of cyber hacking is one of the few things that appears to be on the way up.
It appears foolproof, given the lack of progress in tracking the major hacking “companies” down.
I read a tale the other day about how some lower-key hackers had managed to step into a few sites and had intercepted messages — like ones between some folks in Parliament. Easy solution to avoid this.
Try writing the message on a piece of paper, fold it up and then place it in an envelope addressed to the recipient.
No one else is going to see it. And it’s like how Nasa once spent millions of bucks creating a ballpoint pen that could work in space, for conventional ones could not push the ink forward in a gravity-free environment.
Yeah, they worked and they made it very clear to their Russian rivals what they had done to enable them to write notes and reports while in space.
The Russian chaps smiled and simply pointed out that they had saved millions on that front. They used pencils. Evolution huh?
Mind you, the new craft brews are certainly on the way up — I may go and hack into one now.