Number 2

Image from Pixabay

“Up for number 2? Please do it at home, because our toilet gets clogged quickly.”

On our way home from a short vacation we stopped at a cafeteria close to home, because we had no food in the house. And there, on the otherwise neat toilet, I spotted that note. The text reminded me of Belgian roads. Instead of repairing the sometimes abominable road surface, they put a sign next to it: degraded road.

Of course, placing a sign is much cheaper than fixing the problem. At least, at first glance. Perhaps hungry guests will avoid this cafeteria in the future, because after a long walk in the area they still have to go somewhere with their number 2 before they eat their fries. That means loss of turnover. And in Belgium, cars wear out faster. Moreover, I can imagine that a bad road surface causes more accidents: you lose control of the steering wheel when you drive through a pothole, or you try to avoid the pothole and collide with another car. All of that causes extra costs, and perhaps even human suffering.

And if our southern neighbours were to halve the excessive lighting of the country's roads, wouldn't they have any money left to repair those same roads? That's a bit more complicated. My physics teacher from a long time ago once explained why the Belgians have so many street lamps. That was due to the construction of nuclear power stations. They gave the country overcapacity. You have to go somewhere with that electricity, and that's why all those lamps were planted. Even then, there was already talk of grid congestion; the generated electricity had to be used up immediately. By the way, I have no idea whether that argument still holds true decades later, but I always liked this fascinating - because unexpected - connection.

If you have a problem, you want to solve it. For example, by removing the cause. If that isn’t possible, because you have no influence on it, you can take measures to compensate for the negative consequences. And if that isn’t possible either, for example because you do not have the money for it, then… Well, then you can always put up warning signs.

An example where it is difficult to remove the cause is cybercrime. Sure, these criminals are arrested with some regularity – just like their analogue colleagues – but there are simply too many of them and they often operate from safe foreign countries, where the Dutch strong arm has little control over them (although there are rare cases known in which the Russian justice system cooperated with foreign requests for assistance, for example in the case in which a meter-long file, translated into Russian, was delivered to Moscow).

Because eliminating the cause is so difficult, we have all kinds of measures to detect and neutralize malicious actions. Think of virus scanners, mail filters and people who keep an eye on things. But because all that is not enough, we have to ask everyone to be alert. Phishing is the number 1 point of attention, because one wrong mouse click can ruin an entire organization. That sounds dramatic, but it’s still true. And there are more subjects that all users need to know something about to ensure healthy business operations.

Fortunately, there is a hunger for information about this. In the coming period, I will again be a guest speaker at various organizational units that have asked me to treat their employees to a presentation. I always ask the organizers what is on their minds, what they want to hear about. Such a conversation sometimes provides surprising insights into the success of awareness efforts. Like earlier this week, when I spoke to a colleague about a presentation in their team. The team members are loyal readers of the Security (b)log. Nevertheless, even there, very occasionally someone forgets to lock their workstation when they walk away for a moment. And then their colleagues shout: “Oh, if Patrick sees this…!” It is nice to see that the message is getting across.

 

And in the big bad world…

• a phishing campaign is going around targeting crypto investors.
• hallucinating artificial intelligence can be very harmful.
• the British appear to have pushed back the timeline for quantum-safe cryptography.
• North Korea is going to adopt AI-enabled hacking.
• Others will also abuse AI.
• hackers can easily exploit old vulnerabilities.
• we trust our colleagues, until proven otherwise.
• the American press is realizing that Europe is working on digital sovereignty.
• Athletic soldiers should get off Strava. [DUTCH]
• For the time being, European data may still be sent to the US. [DUTCH]