US companies hit by 'colossal' cyber-attack
These kinds of games, and the all-nighter &#x2F; weeks long nightmares they cause, make me want to leave this industry. We set up software on a lot of machines and then we answer a million ridiculous user questions until we finally resort to installing remote access so we don&#x27;t have to stay up all night telling people what to type into a command line. Then the remote access gets hacked en masse. I&#x27;m pretty much at the point of thinking people need to learn how to write on paper and whiteboards again. Without a well-trained work force, this shit isn&#x27;t resilient, and no technical priesthood can keep it running in the face of constant attempts to demolish it. It&#x27;s too brittle, and the knowledge of the user base is too shallow.<p>Depth can be provided by reverting to older skill sets. Fallbacks. <i>Businesses should not go down because their computers locked up with ransomware.</i><p>I pitched and wrote some software for a company a few years ago to automate a very rigorous daily process that used to take a lot of man-hours. Occasionally, local networks would go down and people would have to revert to the old way of doing things on paper. But as turnover happened at the company, fewer and fewer people knew the &quot;old way&quot;. Now they&#x27;ve reached a point where they&#x27;re locally paralyzed if there&#x27;s a network outage. They have to call in senior management on their day off to run the shop. I realized I didn&#x27;t do them a favor. I solved one problem for them and saved them a lot of labor, but I created a whole new problem of reliance on a system that&#x27;s more convenient, but much less robust than the paper system they used to have. And this doesn&#x27;t even take into account the potential for security issues.<p>I think we should try somehow to architect things with offline fallbacks and training for those scenarios. The pace of attack is unsustainable and we&#x27;re losing the war. If the point is to keep business running, we <i>will</i> lose the war if we lose the skill base and knowledge that we had which was capable of running the economy without a screen in front of them.<p>[edit] Come to think of it, there&#x27;s a great startup idea in systematically re-paperizing businesses for failover. Take all that business logic that got written into software, and turn it back into a set of worksheets and training manuals.