When the world grinds to a halt
Our older daughter was summoned for jury duty last Friday morning. She dressed nicely and drove to our very small rural county seat to report for duty. What she thought was going to be a very long day of civic responsibilities turned into a very short jaunt. She was home within a couple of hours.
Why? Because the global cyber security outage that happened early that morning – which caused more than 1 billion Windows-based computers to crash worldwide – even impacted our local court system, which was unable to access its own information as a result.
This incident was, needless to say, a massive vulnerability in an inter-connected system of anything. It’s not that cybersecurity isn’t necessary; but by having one access point – apparently globally – then it’s vulnerable to massive disruptions. Even a very small rural county seat is affected. Everyone was reporting the “blue screens of death.”
The IT outage affected banking, transportation and logistics, medical systems, news organizations, sporting events, manufacturing, supply chains, package deliveries (i.e. FedEx, UPS, Amazon), government services, retail and e-commerce, education, and much more. As one source noted, the worldwide IT outage seemed a little “like Y2K, except it actually happened this time.”
Even now, a week later, Delta Airlines is still facing issues. “The meltdown has ensnared an estimated half a million people, ruined holidays and travel plans and prompted a federal investigation – even as Delta flight cancellations and delays are ongoing and far outpacing issues at other carriers,” notes CNN. The airline has faced at least 4,500 cancellations so far.
While other transportation sectors (railroads, shipping, trucking) have mostly recovered, CNBC notes air freight might take longer to recover, with corresponding snarls in supply chains.
The cause of this global snafu was not, as initially thought, a cyber-attack. Rather, it was caused by a botched CrowdStrike software update that crashed Microsoft operating systems and caused the largest IT outage in history.
“The flaw essentially caused computers running Microsoft Windows to freeze up and display the dreaded ‘blue screen of death,'” wrote Fortune. “Affected systems needed to be brought back to life, one by one. ‘You have to physically walk over to every computer and power it down and then bring it up, and when the screen comes up, you have to hit F3 to go into what they call Safe Mode and then go and delete a file somewhere,’ the New York law firm CISO explained. ‘It’s just a nightmare.'”
“We’re reaching the point where over-centralization makes us less ‘healable,’ and less resilient,” said Robert Thomas, owner of cybersecurity company 180A Consulting and a former Defense Department staffer. “We’re losing our resiliency as a nation.”
It didn’t take pundits long to draw the obvious conclusions: If a disruption this massive can happen from a simple software upgrade, how much worse would a deliberate cyber-attack be? Our planet’s critical infrastructure is terrifyingly interconnected. Humans are desperately dependent on technology. The CrowdStrike failure revealed just how fragile a technologically advanced civilization can be. If you want to see the modern world literally grind to a halt, stop the internet and see what happens.
Nor did it take long for the conspiracy theorists to start spreading rumors. This outage was deliberate, they whispered. It was not an accident; it was orchestrated as a test of the emergency cyber-attack network.
Orchestrated or not, if the CrowdStrike debacle did nothing else, it underscored how insanely vulnerable the agenda of a cashless society would be. Putting aside any weaponization of digital currency against the political-enemies-du-jour, it would be far too easy for hackers or cyber-attackers to bring down the financial system, both on a national or global scale.
As WIRED magazine reported: “[The outage] quickly caused chaos in Australia, whose government has explicitly encouraged businesses to go cashless. Pictures posted on social media showed card-only self-checkout registers at the grocery chain Coles displaying Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). Queues for human-run registers at Australian groceries stretched to the back of the store, according to local media. Some Australian marts simply locked their doors…”
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It goes without saying that cash does not crash. As the ” Naked Capitalism ” website put it, “[Cash] does not fail in a power cut or seize up during a cyber-attack or software outage (though, of course, ATMs might). By contrast, digital payment systems generally need a stable and continuous internet connection and power supply to process transactions.”
Sadly, the prospect of a “stable and continuous internet connection and power supply” becomes less and less likely as fossil fuels are compulsorily phased out and faulty green alternatives are forcibly imposed across the world.
To this end, some European central banking systems as well as legacy media are starting to sound the alarm and put on the brakes regarding the push for cashless societies.
This was, of course, after a massive push by those same bankers and media to go cashless, which reached a peak during the pandemic: “Central bankers themselves have admitted that the pandemic played a key role in accelerating the mass abandonment of cash and adoption of contactless, mobile and online payments. As the author and cash advocate Brett Scott notes, since the pandemic the private sector has turbocharged its anti-cash drive, ‘as Big Finance, Big Tech and Big Retail have weaponized the public’s temporary fear of physical contact to amplify the anti-cash automation agenda that they already had.'”
“There will always be outages,” Ron Delnevo, the chair of the Payment Choice Alliance, told the newspaper. “But if there is no alternative, then the whole thing can collapse around you.”
Why are governments willing to risk this? We all know the push toward digital currency has nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with control. It’s the ultimate method of stripping away anonymity and the easiest thing to weaponize against political opponents. But of course it won’t be just the little people or political opponents who suffer during a worldwide outage; it will be the wealthy and elite as well.
In the prepper world, there’s a common saying: Three is two, two is one, one is none. In other words, redundancy is critical. If you erase ALL possible financial redundancy by forcibly converting the entire planet into a cashless society, it’s only a matter of time until “the whole thing can collapse around you” – including for the powerful and elite.
Hopefully this is the silver lining to the massive disruptions caused by the global cyber security outage last week. If nothing else, perhaps it will kill the idea that digital currency is the way of the future. As many people learned the hard way, cash is still king – with good reason.
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