Battlestar Galactica Lessons from Ransomware to the Pandemic

What is currently driving corporate security practices is <i>insurance</i>. As attacks become more common and more devastating insurance becomes both more necessary and harder to get. Insurance companies are demanding ever greater audits and measures in order to get insured.<p>The market is actually doing what it&#x27;s supposed to in this case even if it is reactionary. All hope is not lost.

The Cylons sent a humanoid sleeper agent to seduce the designer of their new intelligent battle software for their spaceships , he gave her root access since she demonstrated remarkable coding skills (she was a Cylon) and she inserted the necessary backdoors.

I&#x27;ve been reading her since her book &quot;Twitter and Teargas&quot; and I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a journalist alive today who synthesizes information across such a broad range and with such clarity and attention nuance as Zeynep.

Link without tracking tokens:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinsight.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;battlestar-galactica-lessons-from" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinsight.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;battlestar-galactica-lessons-fr...</a>

&quot;Currently, only about one fourth of gas stations in North Carolina (where I am) are reporting that they have any gas.&quot; But this was mainly because of panic buying. The pipeline shutdown alone didn&#x27;t suffice to cause the shortage.

In hindsight, I&#x27;m starting to think that fixing the Y2K bugs was a mistake. Or maybe we shouldn&#x27;t have fixed <i>all</i> of them. Let a few ATMs and electric plants shutdown, remind us what <i>could</i> have happened. As it is, we ended up complacent because nothing happened when those Chicken Littles said Y2K was going to cause problems.

One of my clients was hit with a ransomware attack on their website.<p>It was a WordPress website, and I got an email that the website was down. I visited the website and saw the ransom, something something pay us in bitcoin.<p>I had been using their backup services for a long time, so it took me three minutes to create a new server and import the data and the site was down for no longer than 10 minutes.<p>I changed the users passwords and had virtually forgotten about it for a few weeks. When I was reminded about it a few weeks later, when a user asked why the password was changed.<p>Does it cost too much to do backups?

All of this has happened before, and will happen again.