‘The Land of Counterpane’ (1905) by Jessie Willcox Smith, based on the poem of the same title by Robert Louis Stevenson.

As an optimist, it sucks to acknowledge this: over the next few years we’re going to see waves of automated hacking that affect every aspect of our lives. It will feel like a global pandemic. Most of us will be affected, and we will all know someone who got severely hacked, causing them serious loss or distress.

I feel awful sounding so dramatic, but it’s plainly obvious that AI-fuelled automation makes hacking trivially easy. A single person can quickly amass an army of self-replicating attackers, and a well-resourced group can do much more. Those of us who work in tech already see it every day, spending more and more of our time battening down the hatches. Just in the last two weeks, off the top of my head: the Binance heist, French blood-bank freezers, South African credit-card details, global GitHub Actions secrets. You’ll have read about others.

All of us, to some degree, rely on human-level obfuscation to keep information private. For millennia, hiding things by making them hard for humans to find was a reasonable way to keep things safe. But there is no hiding from a multiplying hoard of determined, tireless bots who can reason their way through unpredictable barriers, or pretend to be someone they are not.

The best we can do is work on our digital immune systems: backups, two-step logins, strong passwords, updated software. Demand excellence from well-resourced companies like banks and online platforms, who should be investing more in boring back-end security than new features or marketing campaigns. Work only with humans you like and trust to be careful with your data. Corroborate what you read. And take a cautious, skeptical approach to new technologies. If something doesn’t have to be plugged into the web, don’t plug it into the web. Every piece of tech we add opens a new pathway for the pandemic.

Finally, enjoy being offline, or relearn how to: reading on paper, being outside, exercising, crafting, cooking, performing, building, gardening – ideally with lovely people – so that when the Internet bites you, you don’t feel like everything is falling apart. It will eventually be okay, but we have to ride out the fever. ♥️