From Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Véliz:
Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack. The internet crashes. Maybe the electricity is down too. Even your landline, if you still have one, might be down. You can’t reach your family, you can’t call your doctor, you can’t even access the news. You can’t go out because of the pandemic. It gets dark early and you have one candle left to burn (who keeps boxes of candles any more?). Your electric heating doesn’t work. You don’t know what has happened, and you don’t know when or if normality will resume. This scenario is not so far-fetched. After all, cyberattacks spiked as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.fn3 With so many people working from home with insecure Wi-Fi and unsafe devices, the ‘attack surface’, or possible points of entry, increased. Britain’s electricity system’s administrator was hit by a cyberattack during lockdown; fortunately it didn’t affect the electricity supplies. Attacks against the World Health Organization increased fivefold during the same period. It’s only a matter of time before a massive cyberattack happens. We know this, just as we knew a pandemic would happen sooner or later. We have to be better prepared, and we have to take action now if we are to have the slightest chance of preventing or mitigating such an event.
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