Offline - There is Always a Next Time

We are offline again due to a security incident affecting our core infrastructure. We had our first big hit in September 2019 where almost everything was offline for several days. Another second but smaller incident happened in June 2020 and then there were a series of minor incidents affecting specific systems over the years. On Monday night, another significant incident surfaced causing all of our IT infrastructure to be shut down, including the core network infrastructure. The key difference compared to the first big incident 4+ years ago is that some email and collaboration tools are meanwhile running in the cloud, so we do not have to put up papers to communicate.

The series of incidents of course leads to questions. Are we a high profile target? Are we a cheap target? Or is this the new normal companies have to live with?

Since my way of working with computers is not very mainstream, I am likely affected by my office getting disconnected more than others. I am also affected more than others by security solutions that perform bizarre things like rewriting bodies of Internet mail messages. I am not sure where this leads, does it help to run my own isolated IT infrastructure, which avoids all fancy and hard to secure complex services? Well, in fact I do, but it is disconnected right now. If I read that office programs like Excel support wonderful formats like XLL, then it feels like the business world is entirely confused about their preference of certain products. Can the vendors of office software be held liable for security attacks that their tools enable? This may be more effective than all thesecurity products out there that just add more complexity with apparently limited gain.