I do have a window here. Occasionally, I look up to see whether any planes are falling out of the sky. Being in an undisclosed location with very low air traffic, I can’t be sure whether airline systems are still down or not. I have turned my phone off and disconnected my Amazon Fire TV. One never knows which pipeline the – [sinister music] — Blue Screen of Death will take to bring total world terror that will make Covid seem like a sneeze and 9/11 the name of a Bengali convenience store chain.
To be honest, on Friday morning when I first noticed my laptop turn blue, I thought BSOD was a variation of the acronym I may have occasionally Google-searched — for research, of course — on my office computer. But with no customary ‘Web Page Blocked in accordance with company IT security policy. Category Name: Adult Content – Pornography’ appearing on my screen, I realised that this was not about action taken against a harmless BDSM-curious.
On realising that the screen of my Dell Latitude 7430 is too thin to place a candle inside it – and thereby light it up and provide an alternative source of power – I put it away along with my Wi-Fi unit. I have not touched them since. And, off the record (for my office HR personnel, who don’t read this column anyway), I remain totally offline.
I have no information of the outside world as I write this, and that’s the way I plan to keep it. But over the landline phone, whose wires I’ve subsequently yanked off, I learnt over the hour since the outage that at the source of the – [sinister music] Blue Screen of Death, is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company based in Austin,
Prior to Friday morning, the unfortunately-named CrowdStrike – calling a cyber security company CrowdStrike is worse than calling a financial services company Robinhood – had made quite a reputation for itself for being ‘cloud-first’ and thereby reducing the software load on customers. ‘Because of the cloud, [hackers] can scale exponentially — no longer a street corner but the entire globe,’ CloudStrike CEO George Kurtz had explained in 2015. And so, these guys took the fight to the cloud.The 13-year-old company publishes threat reports, tracking the likes of Syrian cyber army Ghost Jackal, and our very own Viceroy Tiger that focuses its own cyber attacking talent mainly against Pakistani government and security entities. CyberStrike’s board is sloshing with ex-senior FBI executives. And Microsoft hitched its Azure cloud platform pony with
Like Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who refused to believe Allied propaganda that World War 2 was over, and hid himself in Lubang Island in the Philippines refusing to surrender until in 1974, I, too, am staying put here to live life analog. You folks, tech care.
