In 1969-70 the Temptations recorded a song entitled “War” shortly thereafter being remade by Edwin Starr and released as a single hitting #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States.

Temptations version:  Link
Edwin Sarr version:  Link

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh

Well, as we know, this is not entirely true!  War is in fact great for things like selling, profiteering, and heightening the sense of urgency to pull the trigger on a new fangled IT solution that can protect you from the oncoming onslaught of attack!

Thus, we find ourselves in “the dawning of the age of Aquarius” (Link) only, instead of Jupiter aligning with Mars, peace guiding the planets, love steering the stars, harmony, understanding, sympathy, abounding trust, golden living, dream realization, true minds of liberation, and letting the sunshine in…we have fear mongering for profit.  We hate being a digital Zodiac Killer but if the shoe fits…we are entering the dawning of the age of the nefarious.

Here are just a few examples that make almost no sense.

This comes to us by a product we use and endorse, Wordfence.  Wordfence is a “WAF” (Web Application Firewall).  Unlike a hardware router / firewall, Wordfence is a piece of software that works at the “application layer” in front of your website, hosted on the same server and in the same folder as your website.  It preprocesses web traffic before that traffic touches your website.  It is clever and useful which is why we use it.  Unfortunately, they have fallen prey to a devilish sales tactic using war propaganda to promote their product and message.

The team at Wordfence is suggesting that they are entering “…a higher state of vigilance”.  But wait…isn’t that your job?  Isn’t that the only thing you do as a company?  Aren’t you paid to be on high alert?  It would seem the Ukraine news is a prime opportunity to sell sell sell!  Pro tip, your website is not under any more or less attack than yesterday or last week.

Here is another example, then we will conclude.  This comes to us with a long subject in the email subject line:  “Russia will respond with significant cyber warfare on US targets“.

Be aware, while Ukraine may or may not be under attack for whatever geopolitical goal of a nation state, you, yes you, are also under attack by a sales force army attempting to profit by this heightened sense of fear.

No, we did not redact the “Technology Advisors” contact information from C3 Tech Advisors.  We have no NDA!  It starts off as “This is an unusual message…” but is it?  Really?  No, in fact in the greater context it is not unusual at all is it?  Is it necessary to discuss?  No, in fact it is not necessary as you should already have in place multiple systems to mitigate any threat regardless of where we find ourselves from day to day.  It is not an unusual message in fact, it is the exact opposite becoming quite common which you should see more and more of in the coming days.

Regardless of what happens with nation states and geopolitics, your website, your servers, your infrastructure is continually under attack.  There is nothing to see here folks, nothing new is under the sun and it is not the dawning of the age of Aquarius nor is that dawning on the near horizon.  Attack attempts have not ramped up magically because there’s an international spat, they are a persistent drone of attacks 24 x 7 x 365.

This is the false information targeting you so you will make a move on a purchase.

Here are two examples of attacks on routers we manage with the top 5 attackers (but there are thousands (2500 – 3500 respectively in 24 hours).

Router 1:

Router 2:

We see here that one router is attacked from different IP addresses than the other router.  We see that the countries attacking each are similar but at different frequencies.  On one router, Russia (RU) is in the lead followed closely by the United Kingdom (GB) and the United States (US) while the other is overwhelmingly attacked by the Netherlands (NL) and by a wide margin!  Both are attacked by a company named “recyber” which is a research institution.

“The Recyber project assists researchers, universities and other educational institutions.  Partnered institutions use our platform to conduct their research.

You can opt-out from research by “using our form“. These may or may not be “attacks” in fact.  The Recyber IP addresses are more port scanners looking to see what you are hosting and on what ports.  They are a “discovery service”.  These are the “cyber security” institutions that say things like there are xyz websites in the world that are “unsecure” hosting websites on port 80 instead of 443.  Of course, that data is mostly nonsense for a number of reasons but they authoritatively publish their reports and look important.  They are in fact, unimportant.  Others are spammers which is a type of an attack like phishing, spear phishing, mail bombing, denial of service (DOS or DDOS), direct application vulnerability attemps like memory stack overflows and such.  It gets complicated and technical.

Here are some interesting statistics about the Internet (Link) (Link):

• 50% of all Internet traffic is conducted on mobile devices.
• YouTube is the #1 app and website in the world
• 96% of Americans shop online (259 Million vs China at 1.03 Billion)
• Video streaming accounts for 82% of all IP (Internet Protocol) traffic, gaming traffic online from video games is just 6%
• “Globally, 71% of all Internet traffic will cross content delivery networks”

Our takeaway here should be that the Internet is borderless, it isn’t a scary haven for war, criminals or tyrants.  It is mostly an entertainment and consumption platform whereby you can get cute cat videos or buy delivered groceries.  Sure, you use if for business, sure, there are attacks and sure, there always have been and will be “cyber attackers” but let’s be honest here.
Shouldn’t you already be preventing these things regardless of what new war has started?  Lets not also forget the importance of “internal controls”, an analog solution to a digital problem.  If you get an email wanting you to update an ACH account for a vendor, what’s your procedure?  Do you just update it and start sending remittances?  Please shake your head no!  Does your staff in accounts payable know this?

We would encourage any company that instead of buying into some new sales pitch magic software stack of protection that they should reexamine their analogue controls before considering any digital one’s.  This is not meant to minimize the importance of things like your digital systems security stack.  Things like your firewall, block lists, DNS filter, intrusion detection, anti-virus, etc, etc, etc but all the digital things should already be buttoned up, documented and continually maintained.  If they are not already, they should be.
Beware of the IT Industrial Complex attempting to cash in, attempting to war profiteer.  Be aware of fear mongering tactics and companies trying to leverage flashy news threats you may be anxious about possibly putting you in a compromised state to make a good rational decision.  Many of these things may in fact be good, you may already be using them like us (Wordfence) or their equivalents.  It is highly likely these sales pitches are nothing more than noise which can be ignored.