Thoughts From My Inbox

October 29th, 2021

Something About…

Always make sure your passport is up to date (I just renewed mine a few weeks back, and now have to wait 14 weeks for the new one to arrive). A Russian developer was recently extradited to Cleveland to face charges for his work on the TrickBot malware, used to take millions of dollars from numerous organizations around the world, including a few local school districts. He had travelled to South Korea but got stuck there when Covid lockdowns hit.  By the time he was allowed to leave, his passport had expired.  And that’s when he got arrested. 

Talk about ‘buyer’s remorse’… a couple in Sydney, Australia, recently got cold feet after spending $2.55M (AUS) on a townhome. Nine weeks later, they sold it for $3.15M, even though they hadn’t put a dime into the place.  That’s a nice ROI!

Last week, we had part one in a two part series on the history of bathrooms.  For those of you sitting on the edge of your (toilet) seats, we now have part two, covering the 20th and 21st centuries.  This covers everything from the move away from claw foot tubs to pastel toilets and the fact that  November 19th is now World Toilet Day (glad that happened after my dad passed away, as he wouldn’t have been thrilled to share his birthday with a bunch of toilets).  And, for those longtime readers of Thoughts From My Inbox, you may be reminded of the overly smart toilet that was mentioned sometime back.

Way back in the day, my dad raced Porsches and Mercedes as part of SCCA (Sports Car Club of America).  In some cases, my mom (hi mom) was his navigator.  There are still trophies and ribbons kicking around the house and garage from those days, well before I was born.  As a little kid, my dad bought a 1960 Alfa Romeo (in 1973) and rebuilt it from the ground up.  So while not a huge racing fan, I pay a little attention in general, and Alfa Romeo always perks my ears up.

Saw a piece earlier this week about the continuing rise in popularity of Formula One in the US (due in part to the Neflix series Drive to Survive, which is a pretty good show).  Then I got an email about Alfa Racing’s ‘Official Cloud Supplier’. While I never considered it before, I’m sure that every race team uses the cloud, and this is gives a little more detail about Alfa’s usage.  

98% of US-based organizations experienced at least one cyber event in the past year.  That number seems really high if you ask me (nobody did), but it comes from Deloitte’s ‘Future of Cyber Survey‘, which covered 577 executives (only 159 in The U.S.).  It’s been a while since I’ve taken statistics (and I didn’t like it when I did take it), but I guess that 577 may be statistically significant. In any case, it’s a larger sample size than the Business Aftermath Report mentioned above.

Regardless of the sample size, it’s interesting to see that US execs were most concerned about “unintended actions of well-meaning employees”.  This outpaced ransomware, phishing, and threats from third parties and nation states, and it makes sense as employees are a company’s first line of defense.  Thus the importance of security awareness training.