In places where there are indoor mask mandates like where I live in California there is the phenomenon now of loud talking. What used to be the punchline of a Seinfeld episode is now very much the reality for millions of people here in the LA area and beyond.
As we head into one of the summer’s final weekends, I’m doing the usual exercise of wondering where all the time went. This certainly was not a restful summer for the world what with Delta variants, ransomware attacks, record-setting wildfires and now hurricanes baring in on my hometown. On a lighter note, we were also not resting at RPost in bringing you our virtual user conference and many new, groundbreaking and value-packed features for RMail and RSign.
Did you hear the one about the guy who couldn’t remember his “unhackable” Gmail password, so he changed his name to 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3? Now that you’ve stopped laughing uncontrollably, we can talk about something slightly more sobering: A new ransomware attack will occur every 11 seconds this year according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The estimated total cost of these attacks? $20 billion. “Back” in 2018, 39% of ransomware victims capitulated with the ransomers. This year, the number could be more like 58%. So the question becomes, how much of a share of that $20 billion might you be paying out if your systems aren’t secure enough?
The star-crossed 2020 Summer Olympics (held in 2021) will probably go down either as one of the most or least memorable Olympics in history. What will it be remembered for: the durability of the athletes and the organizers throughout a global pandemic? The willingness of some star athletes to drop out of events for mental health reasons? The lack of fans in the stands? The cardboard beds?
Ransomware is again in the news—this time in terms of what state and local governments are actively doing to prevent it. At least three US states—New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania—are considering legislation that would ban state and local government agencies from paying ransom if they’re attacked by cyber criminals. Read more
15 or so years ago, ‘the cloud’ was considered the next big thing in business and personal technology. No longer did each machine you used need to have files or applications stored on it locally. When you worked on a document in the office, you now didn’t need to email it to yourself so you could work on it from your home PC. If you wanted to do online banking or instant messaging, you no longer had to load the actual applications onto each machine you wanted to use. The possibilities were transformative. Your music could be accessed anywhere from any device. Movies could be rented via download or streaming instead of via using cracked DVDs that skipped, etc.
Ransomware has become such a hot topic with a seemingly new case every day that we thought we would pick up where we left off last week…
We first wrote about Ransomware attacks in Tech Essentials in 2017 – back when a Bitcoin was valued at $1800 (oh, the good old days). The crux of the article was that many victims were paying their ransom to the cyber perpetrators, but they did not have an easy way to track and reconcile who paid, and many who did pay the ransom never got the decryption key to unlock their files. Imagine this happening in the analog world with kidnapping cases!
This time of year, Americans are obviously thinking about independence. And this year, independence will take on even greater importance because the lockdowns are over, and we are free again to travel to see our friends and family for the holiday.
“To Err Is To Be Human”—a great quotation coined, I believe, by Rodney Dangerfield, or maybe Alexander Pope. My mistake. To be human is great—you get to enjoy earthly pleasures like food and music in ways that machines will never be able to do (at least for now). Humans get to love and run through fields of sunflowers in slow motion with their soulmates—not something an Alexa can do (at least for now). Can your iPhone experience the miracle of childbirth? Probably not for another 20 years until the release of IOS 34.
