We created a Monster

Hello my Friends,

Some of you who are my age may remember Audrey II from the musical “Little Shop of Horrors”. That is a fun story about love and a cute little blood-eating plant that grows to become a MONSTER.

I recently received a personalized, but not really personal email that made me reflect how I contributed to the creation of a monster that is now haunting many people and not just those who were involved in its creation. I am talking about the Internet and some of the unsavory applications that it has enabled.

After working many years at the technology foundation of the “Connecting Everything” company I cannot quite claim to be the inventor of the Internet (If I remember correctly that might have been Al Gore?) but I have contributed to its growth.

The email that appeared in my inbox had my name in the subject line with a family name in all caps, and attached was a PDF with my name as file name. The sender was supposedly a Floretta Swierk [email protected] which is not a contact of mine. After many years of corporate IT training classes that teach us not to open any documents with exception of .txt, I knew that I should not open that file. Curiosity got the better of me and I opened it on a burner system that I was willing to sacrifice.

I was looking at an extortion letter with some of my personal information that the sender included to prove he knew who I am and where to find me. That information and much more has been public for a long time. The complete W2 info of one of my previous employers was mailed out after a successful spearfish attack. And there have been many more hacks and loss of personal data events in the news over the years. We essentially live in a world where everybody is connected, and all personal information is out there somewhere for hackers and extortionists to approach us from all over the world. Yikes!

The letter demanded $1950 in Bitcoin to BTC ADDRESS: 18Ks2kpPhAQS5nkFLW1BMqvDSoqnpzaL1

I spare you most of the letter. Many of you may have received a similar one, too. I just like to quote the end where the writer ominously says:

“And don't even think about turning off your phone or resetting it to factory settings. It's pointless. I don't make mistakes, Christian.”

The letter continues:

“Hopefully I won’t have to visit you here:” followed by a picture of the house across from ours, at least two years ago. Maybe taken from Google Streetview before a major and lengthy remodel started. For somebody who makes no mistakes this was weak. He clearly has not been in our neighborhood in a long time…

Anyway, I googled for similar extortion attempts and such letters are already reported in the news. This shows our most powerful tool to deal with such threats is knowledge, education, and the delete button. And when you listen to politicians that say “I love the uneducated” do yourself a favor and get educated! You deserve somebody else’s love!

Here are some thoughts about the future of the Internet:

Will my free email service support an Extortion folder next to the SPAM folder with automatic classification?

Can AI read the extortion letters for me and send law enforcement to the perpetrators without me having to file a report at the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.gov )? The BTC address is known. Shouldn’t that be sufficient to find the perpetrators?

Aside from these unsavory and unsettling outflows from the Extortionnet I am also worrying that the explosive growth of all the datacenters and their unsatiable hunger for electricity will transform even the useful aspects of the Internet into a monster that needs to be tamed, or humanity will get cooked. Power efficiency to the rescue! #StopCrypto

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Happy Halloween my friends!

Be careful of Audrey II! And the Internet. They all want your best. Your blood or money!

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