Robert Johnson is believed to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Legend has it the devil offered Johnson in trade a well-tuned guitar and a peculiar gift for singing the blues. His songs have been made famous by Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and The Rolling Stones, among others. Despite this oft-intoned gift, Johnson suffered an early departure from this world, though one shudders at the thought of such talent descending eternally southward into fire and brimstone, a musical fate we’d more readily assign to boy bands and pre-pubescent pop stars.

Cybersecurity faces a similar crossroads, a point at which hackers offer their wares on an open market, trading evil for a fleeting moment of fame and a handful of coins. Bitcoins, more precisely. As reported on Softpedia and elsewhere, BuggiCorp — whose hacker handle is eerily reminiscent of adolescent band names — is offering to a single buyer the capacity to make as many as 1.5 billion users of Windows 10 sing the blues, all for the low price of $90,000.

Malevolence and Greed

From an admittedly naive perspective, this gratuitous offer of chaos and destruction sings of a new level of evil, and, separately, critics have argued that the BuggiCorp threat is overpriced because it can only escalate access, not infect computers. But some of those 1.5 billion vulnerable Windows users would argue that such depravity should not be rewarded at any price. Its availability on the open market should remind us all of the constant threat among us. Like the poison that took Robert Johnson way too early, most of those users wouldn’t know anything about the Zero Day exploit eating away at their digital innards until it was too late.

Sing a New Song

Your organization is at the crossroads. Bring ICS in on lead guitar and let’s put your data to work singing lead vocals, supported by the steady beat of your network running smoothly and rhythmically. You can’t spell cybersecurity without ICS, so don’t even try to sing it. Call us instead.