Our Daily Breach: Season 2 Finale
Murdoc ends the season with a punch to the face. Don't worry, the face deserves it.
You took a day off of Our Daily Breach. Maybe come up with a better name?
Well if you're keeping score, I took a day off last year to get caught up on personal affairs. Same thing this year. I got my familiar looking down from below my desk wondering if I'll pet her or if I'll just keep typing. I normally would pet the dog, but something just feels weird about everything I've covered so far.
What's wrong my dude? Are you sad it's the finale and you didn't learn anything nice about the cybersecurity industry?
No, it's not that. In fact, that's not even true, I learned that public sector services like libraries really set examples on how to provide updates on incidents. The private sector does not do more than they are obligated to. While I'm working with a very limited sample size, there was one pattern that consistently stood out to me that I didn't expect.
The companies that didn't address their data breaches, swept them under the rug, they all gained market value over time regardless of the incident. I verified this observation with a local industry veteran and in their exact words: "the best time to buy is right after they've been breached, it always dips for a bit - then comes back". With extremely rare exceptions of business ending cyberattacks, this short swoosh pattern of market value: company gets hacked, stonk go down briefly, then back up again. This pattern showed up with every company except for the one that did update their clients, Casio. Keep loving your Casio, they at least tried. I'd love to sit down and data science the shit out of this someday. If that's something you're interested in exploring, you know were to find me - screaming into a void.
Are you internally screaming because none of the companies you reached out to bothered to write you back?
Naw, fuck em. I had more fun filling in the blanks on the stories and chasing my own leads. It lead to some weird places, hence the gilded dildo story.
Also technically not true either, I did hear back from one former employee of a recently breached company. While I loved the story of how Kurt got got and I think it's a great example of how you should handle an incident, I wasn't convinced by this former employee's answer that wouldn't cause problems at home so I moved on to cover other bullshit.
You still sound upset. Are you mad that your Quebecois rogue cell of Antifa lost all that time plotting 1812 part deux: electrique bougalou?
Tabernak, who snitched!? Yep, you got me. Living in Canada for the past 9 years, all I wanted to do torch the White House, but now that that's been culturally appropriated by Russians I dunno what we'll do. I guess we take down our George Soros posters and shred our Antifa badges. I laminated mine, so that's gonna be annoying.
No but seriously, seeing the White House in this state of demolition...
... it takes the wind out of your sails a bit. Don't get me wrong, seeing a torn down East Wing built in the age of asbestos with none of the crew wearing proper safety gear is a perfect analogy for this administration. Still, it was a "WTF are we doing moment?" for me when this story broke. Writing silly stories about greedy companies making stupid mistakes can be a lot of fun and even a little therapeutic. However, when there are real habeas corpus suspending fascist horrors going down in our own backyard, it is hard to remain silly.
Final thoughts 🌶️
While it's still legal to say express criticisms of the government, there's some stuff I've been wanting to get off my chest and maybe it'll give some context on why I'm so vocal about this administration and its failing governance.
As a kid, I remember swearing the pledge of allegiance facing the American flag every morning in school. Both my parents served in the US military. My generation was taught that America was the champion of civil liberties. When Jesse Owens took 4 golds in the 1936 Berlin Olympics - that ended the idea of white supremacy. Then in the 1960s Martin Luther King and most Americans gleefully skipped down to Alabama where they ended segregation, thus ending racism. When the Berlin wall came down in 1989, it was over for Communism. By the time I left high school, it was easier for me to picture the end of the world before picturing the end of capitalism.
Looking back, we weren't educated, we were indoctrinated. Now that I'm almost 40, I've have had time to read and learn a more complete history of the United States, one that is being erased.
My generation was not taught what The Green Book was or why black people needed it to travel across the South in the Jim Crow era. I was much older when I first heard of the massacre in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This year, while reading Why Fish Don't Exist I learned that 1/3 of Puerto Rican women were forcibly sterilized in the 1960s.
Given all I've learned about sustainability and what nations have done to protect their financial best interests, I no longer see a world where any of us are safe under capitalism. People with significant capital have this trend of abusing that wealth in such that the youth and our planet of finite resources end up paying the cost. We have plenty of distractions to keep us occupied. We gotta keep our streaks going. There is no shortage of rage bait that feels like it should be an Onion article. I wanted to give you a break from that.
In writing Our Daily Breach this season I never once used generative AI. All the writing and wit I spent to give you a chuckle in these dark times came from between my ears. All I ask in return is that you keep an open mind between yours about alternative governance models, because for profit companies aren't helping, they are the problem. As absurd as it sounds, the only way that most of us can help escape these crimes against humanity that we've been financing all these years is start to trading with worker cooperatives. Ideally, exclusively. If you don't have a cooperative near you, consider starting one in your area today. It doesn't have to be cyber, you will always be able to leverage proper data governance skills wherever you decide to go or whomever you decide to help.
As for the future updates, I will keep working on the Commonscale Chronicles. I think we could all use a bit more Eco-Social Cyberfeminist Utopias to draw inspiration from. If you read my post last Friday, you'll understand you won't be hearing much from me on Discord unless it's about dumb shit 🥔. Until next year, take care and punch nazis.
