Going up

Image from Unsplash

In 1981, we went on holiday to the Costa del Sol. We rented a distant cousin’s apartment for a friendly price, in a building right on the beach of Torre del Mar. That building had an elevator, and that elevator is what I want to talk about. Because it was quite special.

It had no memory. If you wanted to ride it, you pressed a button like with any elevator. But if the elevator was already on its way to another floor, it simply ignored you. You had to press the button again once the ride was finished, and then hope that no one else beat you to it. It could take quite a while before you managed to catch the elevator. And I don’t remember exactly, but I think the buttons inside the elevator had priority over the ones on the floors. Otherwise you might never reach your destination.

So this was an elevator for which it actually made sense to keep pressing the button. But with all modern elevators, ladies and gentlemen, that is completely pointless. Your request is registered, and sooner or later an elevator will come. Repeated pressing only leads to wear on the button. And, perhaps needless to say: only press the button for the direction you want to go, so press the down arrow if you want to go down. If you press the other arrow as well, there’s a good chance you’ll be taken in the wrong direction – to your own annoyance.

Waiting is rarely enjoyable, so we try to shorten waiting times. Sometimes we do things we know won’t help. The same is true when you’re sitting impatiently behind your computer. It doesn’t respond quickly enough, so you try again. That doesn’t help. In fact, it works against you: the computer has to spend attention on your repeated actions, and that costs capacity (though nowadays you barely notice it; in the past, that was quite different).

The power of advertising lies in repetition, according to an old marketing maxim. That’s why you see and hear some ads over and over until they become annoying. But in my field, they’re also quite good at it. At conferences and conventions, we’ve been told for years that we all need to collaborate to create a safer world. Occasionally you’ll see a good example of such cooperation at an event, but in my view, it often remains empty rhetoric. But yes, no one can oppose defeating the common enemy together, so the theme is pulled out of the closet year after year. As far as I’m concerned, a conference only needs a name; a theme is optional. But it doesn’t really matter – as long as the content is good, and fortunately that is often the case.

This week, I attended yet another together-we-can-do-it conference. And once again, the theme fortunately didn’t get in the way of the content. The head of the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service came to tell us that we cannot trust the Russians, and the CISO of Hema showed an AI-generated picture of chains of smoked sausages hanging in the store*, to illustrate the weakest-link mantra; I’ve forgotten most of the content of her talk, but what made an impression on the audience was that in her previous role – because of that role – she had been threatened both physically and digitally. That’s something you don’t even want to imagine.

The best talk came from my cyber hero Mikko Hyppönen from Finland. After a career spanning decades in cybersecurity – he started out as a virus analyst – he recently and to his own surprise made a switch to the defense industry. He no longer analyzes computer viruses but military drones. The war in Ukraine – ‘in the heart of Europe,’ as Mikko put it – pushed him in that direction. Because these drones cause so many casualties, he has made it his mission to help bring these weapons down. And just like with malware, this is a cat-and-mouse game. Classic drones can be tackled via the radio signals used to control them. Five percent of the drones now seen on the battlefield trail a fiber-optic cable of up to twenty kilometers (twelve miles) behind them, meaning no radio signals are needed. And more modern drones aren’t controlled by humans at all anymore, but by AI. And how do you fight that? Exactly: with AI-driven drones.

There are elevators where you don’t press an arrow, but instead enter the floor you want to go to. The computer then calculates which passengers can best be grouped together and assigns everyone an elevator. Then no one ever has to doubt whether the elevator knows they want to ride along.

*: Hema is a Dutch department store. They’re famous for their smoked sausages.

And in the big bad world…

• This list shows Dutch organizations that are completely dependent on American cloud providers. [DUTCH]
• There was another outage at one of those cloud providers.
• The British are suffering from Russian hacktivists.
• CEOs and CISOs disagree on the top three threats.
• This new IoT botnet often appears in corporate and government networks.
• The European Space Agency is struggling with cybersecurity.
• You can now see whether a doorbell video has been tampered with.
• Teams will soon warn users about impersonators.
• AI is clicking on malicious advertisements.
• LastPass users need to watch out for phishing.
• We’ll just keep using the red pencil to vote. (In the Netherlands, voters mark their choice on a paper ballot by coloring a single oval next to a candidate’s name using the traditional red pencil.)