COVID-19 and world today

Has been several months since the world suffer one of the most precise and dedicated **zero day** exploits of our history.
(For those who does not know what a zero day is go [here]), but long story short, we were hit by something we did not know that existed, and had no defense against it until was too late, and… made every infrastructure and protocol fail, every security dude worse nightmare)

Literally this little virus spread across our lives and disrupt every industry, causing major collapses across the world, across culture, governments and industries.

As humans, we failed to defend ourselves.

One clear thing that COVID-19 is still doing to us, is pinning the out liars of our world, forcing our hand to face our biggest fears, ourselves.
From the selfish hoarders, at the beginning, or the leaders that did not listen the warnings, the CEO’s and the market gurus that lied about their investments and put everybody at risk.

We can lie to each other all we want.. we can hide it behind technicalities, and try to defend our countries, our flags, our political party, but we keep forgetting one thing….

Like a computer Virus, COVID-19 does not discriminate, will affect us and change us if we don’t listen and don’t respect the rules, that’s what has been doing all this time.

I’ve been a security architect for almost 18 years now, worked in several companies with different levels of training and expertise, teach security DevOps here and there and security architecture for Cloud Architects and the like. When a security breach reaches a client, it’s 99.9% Human error, either in the perimeter, software pipeline, bug or whatever else, it’s always a human that forgot to check, and a protocol that forgot to verify that, basically I see this happening all the time, seeing it at a massive scale like COVID-19 it’s terrifying.

I saw during this time all level of denial, from businesses that could see this happening miles away and decided to face it and put their employees at risk, to governments that decided not to listen to our very own experts.

As human race, we failed, and 2020 has been our defeat year.
We failed to collaborate as a specie, as one world, we failed obeying simple orders, driven by our own selfishness, we failed protecting our elders, as we forgot about them when we did not take care of ourselves.

And the worst part is .. we could avoid this, prevent it from getting it worst, and we are still unable to do so.

Since the beginning the data was there, our expert told us what could happen if we did not take care of this threat sooner. Was simple, very simple rules.
From a computer perspective… is like “ Do not believe that a Nigerian prince is sending you money” or “ Do not click on that file that says.. ‘install-me.exe’” or “send your bank password over an email”.

I do believe that from this we are going to recover, be better humans, listen, and prepare our lives to be aware of what we are doing, I certainly hope so, that this zero exploit vulnerability and all the enormous cost in lives is worth something.

To learn to be prepared, to trust, to listen, to forget once and for all that is not just about us individually and is about us as a whole.

Of course this post is a rant, a rant from a security guy that just want to be better every day and that learned so much during this year, so much about me but also about the world around me, but it’s seeing so much pain, and bad decisions being made day by day, by the people the suppose to protect us.

I will end this rant with a question.

What you learn this 2020 ? Good or bad…what this hack to society teach you.?

Thanks!
Stay safe, keep safe, keep learning.