This week, I found myself dealing with the fourth cyberattack against one of my clients, virtually identical to the three that had occurred over the past few months. By the fourth, I started to suspect that cybersecurity has far less to do with cyber and far more to do with the security features Mother Nature forgot to install in our brains.
The method is wonderfully primitive: someone calls, poses as technical support, persuades an employee to install remote-access software, and then hands the caller the keys to their computer.
No cascading green code à la The Matrix (which, fun fact, isn’t actually code at all: designer Simon Whiteley took those characters from his wife’s Japanese cookbooks. So, for twenty-five years, we thought we were looking at the source code of reality when we were actually looking at sushi recipes…). No WarGames. No socially awkward genius locked in a basement, cracking RSA while listening to Aphex Twin.
Just a phone call.
Which makes the word hacker feel rather undeserved. Odysseus had to design a gigantic wooden horse, convince the Trojans to drag it inside their city walls, and wait until nightfall before his men could climb out of the beast’s belly.
In 2026, all you need to do is introduce yourself as “Expedia support” and ask someone to install AnyDesk.
Twenty-eight centuries of evolution, and social engineering still works exactly as it did in the Iliad: someone knocks on the door with a gift, and we invite them in.
And that’s what I find fascinating. We spend thousands of euros on firewalls, endpoint detection, antivirus software, multifactor authentication, and consultants with certifications longer than Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—while leaving the most vulnerable device in the entire infrastructure fully operational: Homo sapiens.
Perhaps, then, we’ve been the real malware all along.
And I’m afraid no patch has been released for that one yet.
Until next week. Best regards from Simone.
SIMONE PUORTO
