Have you tried not trusting it? - IT Essentials

In politics as in tech, everything is subject to change - eventually

As hacks rock Europe and a blue wave threatens to wash away US datacentre expansion, infrastructure is having a difficult week.

There are weeks where nothing much happens. News breaks, companies are hacked, politicians make outlandish promises, but none of it is all that noteworthy.

This was not one of those weeks.

In Europe, a cyber campaign has targeted refrigeration controllers: a strikingly similar attack to that against French supermarkets last month. This one was not only more geographically widespread but also affected targets further back in the supply chain, as well as the medical sector.

The attack has all the hallmarks of a nation state culprit: no group has claimed responsibility, there appears to have been no financial motive, and it has affected sectors whose disruption could cause widespread panic. It's straight out of the Russian playbook, though other countries can use the same modus operandi.

Operational technology is an increasingly popular target for attackers: often forgotten about, rarely patched (sometimes, due to age, even unable to be patched), and tied to systems you need to just work.

Leaving these components exposed to the open internet is "like putting out your most prized possessions on the sidewalk," Cynthia Kaiser, ex-deputy director of cyber at the FBI, told us on this week's episode of Ctrl Alt Lead.

The FBI provides a nice segue into the US midterm election results; not, on the face, of it, something likely to directly affect UK or European IT, until you consider what a Democrat-led Congress can achieve – and what it can block.

The US datacentre industry has enjoyed an unprecedented boom under Donald Trump. Permits and federal dollars have been granted willy nilly, despite growing public anger. That anger that showed itself in the election results.

Voters across the country used the midterms as an unofficial referendum on datacentres, and the (largely Republican) candidates backing new campuses were punished at the ballot box.

The AI and cloud companies pushing for datacentre expansion now have to contend with a loss of political support from the top of government as well as at a local level, which is likely to significantly slow the buildout's breakneck pace.

A win for the US public could mean constrained capacity and higher prices for IT teams, and using UK or European capacity – which face their own limits – is not a guaranteed escape route.

What ties these two stories together is misplaced trust, whether it be in system security or that promised datacentre capacity will eventually materialise. Retracing a route back to trust isn't exciting, but it's suddenly become rather important.

Have you tried not trusting it? - IT Essentials

In politics as in tech, everything is subject to change - eventually

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