From Russia, with love
Everybody has their favourite collection of utilities. Not all jobs require much tweaking and fiddling with a well-configured PC these days, but it pays to recall that there are some special cases: virtualisation is one, even on a simple setup like a laptop, just for carrying the ghosts of all your previous versions. You want a spread of information that tells you everything about your machine and its storage of your VMs.
Which is why I like Parallels Toolbox. This is a sizeable collection of little apps to do stuff, a few of which help with virtual machine management. There’s only one small problem: I was first introduced to Parallels as a company over 15 years ago, when it was somewhat closer to Acronis than it is now.
It’s a funny relationship. The two firms have a revolving door for executives and even the occasional CEO, despite having diverged quite a lot over the past few years. I was told all about the skyscraper they have in Novosibirsk, with 400 developers in there doubtless grateful for the warmth. Novosibirsk, you see, is in Siberia.
What does that actually mean, though, in the context of a decent utility package being offered for a few quid? Clicking through as if I were a buyer, I’m presented with a UK-specific shopping cart/checkout page. Most people wouldn’t realise that this is a Russian business – it’s not a Russian name like Kaspersky, and all of the purchase transaction is denominated in pounds – but, in theory at least, buying from this site is currently breaking Russian sanctions.
That’s a nitpicker’s summation, I know. Nobody has thought for a moment about the implementation of a shopping cart on behalf of a corporation that pays tax in a country you are either at war with, or about to be. There’s no international agreement on where money must “rest” in order to avoid seizure, nor yet is there a clear set of tests you can apply to reassure yourself that you (and they) are in the clear.
For me, the real trouble isn’t with whoever is at the far end of my web purchase. The most bother comes from the grand conspiracy theorists looking over my shoulders back here at home. If you buy that, they say, you’re leaving an open door to your entire hard disk, ready for the Russian Security Service to come and look over everything you’ve got. There’s a war on, they say, you have to be careful!
This whole outlook is a pastiche of the Churchillian era, when most government pronouncements on information security appeared on the sides of buses as posters. A bit like a more colourful Twitter, for all you millennials out there. These days we have thousands of pages of advice on keeping information from prying eyes, but most of that was written well before hostilities and the whole sanctions issue even arose.
The problem we have now in 2022, with the whole concept of intrusive behaviour by aggressor nation states, is nothing new and certainly nothing special to a state of wartime. What you were doing before the tanks squeaked over the border – in terms of regular scans for newly infected files, or unexpected bursts of
100% CPU usage when you didn’t ask anything of the machines, or peculiar network traffic – hasn’t magically stopped working since the war turned hot.
Nor, to be even more sensible about it, has anything changed in the files downloaded from e-commerce websites or download libraries. No sudden bloating of the Zip file, or change in checksums, has been found as an authoritative bit of evidence for a “cyberwar campaign” getting ready to roll. Quite a lot of the hype is just that – and that’s why I’m mentioning Parallels, whose employees, in all the years I’ve been talking to them, have been polite, delightful and intelligent.