#BadStockPhotosOfMyJob
The hardest part about working in security is when someone tries to crack the password on the Adriatic Sea by setting it on fire.
The second hardest part is playing the piano solo from “Layla” on your desk before you begin the triage process.
Meanwhile, after a rogue admin Konami-coded their way into AWS’s Artic Circle and Kazakhstan regions, Gabon gets DDoS’ed by shopping carts via a nation-state attack on Aldi’s 25-cent cart-unlocking mechanism.
Such carnage. It’s a good thing you‘re wearing your IR cufflinks.
(As a sidebar: Oceania becoming bar graph-shaped isn’t related to your job. Just collateral damage from climate change. Which you may or may not be contributing to by mining crypto — no, the other crypto — in your spare time.)
Determined to do some Attribution™️ on this attack, you turn to the best tool known to hackerkind for binary analysis: an iPad.
Sadly iOS doesn’t use standard octets; they developed a proprietary system for grouping the beeps and boops (that’s 1s and 0s in security speak, kids).
Your employer, claiming “security is a cost center”, didn’t bother to pay for the accessibility features on your reverse-engineering iPad. It’s so hard to read that you need a magnifying glass.
You try to select “mark as read” but instead you hit “mark as red”.
At last you uncover a human-readable payload.
Oh god.
They’ve encrypted all of your workloads until you give up your fancy suit. And — gasp — your good IR cufflinks. Having seen the Aldi cart DDoS, you know full well the havoc they can wreak.
You pay.
Deprived of your suit, you retire to your lab and fire up the blue lights to ward off the SAD. You sullenly blast Dar Williams’ “I Am the One Who Will Remember Everything”, with an empty gaze into one of your 15 monitors.
Heavy is the head that wears the Warby Parker glasses.
You caress your mechanical keyboard, the only personality you have left now that your suit and cufflinks are in enemy hands.
Small price to pay for security, you muse. For today, you, a mediocre neckbeard named Brayden who failed upward...
You survived your first ransomwear.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.