Editor’s letter
ANOTHER MONTH, ANOTHER ransomware attack. Another month, another cloud-based service that doesn’t work for days. Another month, another reason for me to be convinced that we’re sleepwalking into a “computer says no” future if we insist on dumbing down our devices in return for the so-called convenience of the cloud.
Consider the recent ransomware attack on Garmin. As I write this, my Garmin Connect app still won’t allow me to upload activities, with one message telling me that it’s due to “maintenance” and a second reporting “an outage”. It’s been like that for five days. Now, I don’t care a jot in the short term because I do the exercise for myself, not for Garmin’s gratification, but I like to have long-term records of where I’ve run and in what times.
What this latest attack has once again exposed is how reliant our apps (remember when we had software?) and devices have become on the internet. On the face of it, the Garmin Connect app is installed on my phone, with the handy extra that it will synchronise my data to a webbased service if and when I want it.
However, the reality, as I have discovered these past four days, is that the app is almost worthless if it loses its connection to the mothership. I can’t check details from the hill-filled run that destroyed me on Friday evening, for example, and I’m trusting to my watch’s built-in storage that the details will still be there when Garmin’s services are revived.
On a professional and more serious note, a ZDNet report explained that many pilots couldn’t download the latest aviation databases, which they need before they’re granted permission to fly. Nor could they use the Garmin Pilot app they relied on to plan flights.
The trouble is that we’ve yawned our way into this. We all love our shiny watches and phones so much that we cast aside any boring thoughts about resilience and, you know, how it actually works. We have outsourced our backup plans to companies that may or may not exist next year. Companies that are demonstrably susceptible to attacks that target our data.
This is why, when fellow members on the PC Pro podcast suggest that Windows is doomed because in the future our desktop will be streamed to our dumb devices, I simply can’t agree. Or perhaps more accurately, I don’t want to agree.
After all, anyone who uses Garmin services – or Adobe ( see Jon Honeyball’s column on p130), or Microsoft, or Google, or any of the myriad of services that have failed for hours and days at a time this past year – will have suffered the effect of losing their data umbilical cord. For me, and most others, Garmin is one small element of my life. If it never works again that would be an inconvenience but I would work around it.
Imagine if the proposed Windows-as-a-service were broken. For me, such an outage would escalate from the mild inconvenience of losing my fitness data to a very real loss of income. Now widen that situation out. If the whole of the UK couldn’t work due to our reliance on a service we could no longer connect to, that would go beyond inconvenience and towards catastrophe. Do we really want to put that power into the hands of ransomware attackers?