IT Essentials: What the hell happened?

July and August are traditionally known in the media industry as 'silly season' - a time when news is scarce (everyone's on holiday), and PRs can talk journalists into running puff pieces because there's so little going on.

Perhaps someone can tell the cybercriminals?

In the last week we've seen not just one or two, but four cybersecurity incidents announced, and only one was attributable to human error.

The other three, at LinkedIn, Discord.io and Norfolk and Suffolk police, were all down to malicious activity or technical issues - and follow two major data breaches last week, at the Electoral Commission and Police Service Northern Ireland.

Maybe we should rename Silly Season to Open Season - at least when it comes to security.

Mission: Implausible

In other news, I saw Tom Cruise's latest outing at the cinema last week. The newest Mission Impossible has everything you'd expect: budget-busting set pieces, cinematic gunplay, an emotional death and a ridiculous story. So why am I writing about it here?

Like so many film franchises before, this one plays on the fear of AI as a big bad, and only gets it wrong about 50% of the time. For Hollywood, that's not bad.

I'll avoid spoilers as much as I can, so to summarise: an AI developed as a weapons system goes rogue, assimilates information from around the web and becomes the equivalent of a digital god: "A self aware, self learning, truth-beating digital parasite."

Suddenly, no datacentre in the world is safe. It leads to a scene where hundreds of government officials sit together in a hall, backing up information into paper form. I started to do some calculations on how long it would take to back up a single facility, but got lost. Suffice to say, it's a long time.

The film gets some things right. The concept of an AI "vanishing into the cloud" makes absolutely no sense, but the writers get plaudits for considering air gapping as a solution, and identifying humans as the weak link in cyber.

Although, for a film that really puts a focus on cybersecurity, the best analogy didn't come from any of the times a computer was on screen. For me, the scene that best summed up what it feels like to work in modern infosec was when Tom Cruise's character is cornered in a narrow alleyway, with two opponents kicking the hell out of him while he races to protect a friend.

At the end of the day (this is hardly a spoiler - it's revealed in the first 20 minutes) it turns out that humans, not AI, are the ultimate baddie. The AI doesn't really do much - it's a MacGuffin, a Maltese Falcon. The real conflict comes from the people who want to control it. And that reflects the real world a little too well.

Weekend reading

With Twitter X finally removing Tweetdeck functionality for free users, slashing the site's usability, it seems a good time to read about Elon Musk's 10 biggest fails since the Twitter takeover. Frankly, we're tempted to turn this one into a living document.

For our Midlands-based readers, check out the latest news about the IT Heroes Roadshow, where you can win a brand new Dell laptop with a 13th-generation Core i5 vPro processor. Bonus: You'll also win bragging rights.