Today's Online English Lesson Was Canceled

My scheduled online English lesson was canceled today.

The reason was system maintenance by the service provider.

In fact, the maintenance began yesterday, and the system still has not been restored today.

According to the operator’s announcement, the work was prompted by a recently discovered critical vulnerability in PHP.

Still, when maintenance continues this long, it starts to become a little worrying.

These days, the news seems to be filled with stories about data leaks and unauthorized access.

I have reached the point where hearing that another company has suffered a cyberattack no longer surprises me.

AI Is Changing Hacking

For some time, I have been wondering how advances in AI will change cyberattacks.

Until now, finding weaknesses in a system required a certain amount of specialized knowledge and time.

With AI, however, the work of examining enormous amounts of code and identifying potentially problematic areas can be made far more efficient.

Creating phishing emails for attacks has also become easier than before.

AI companies impose restrictions to prevent dangerous uses, but perhaps those restrictions can be successfully bypassed.

If so, hacking tasks that were once limited to a small number of highly skilled specialists will become accessible to many more people.

If the cost of launching attacks falls, the number of attacks will naturally increase.

Defenders, on the other hand, cannot move so easily.

They must update old systems, investigate problems, and, when necessary, shut down services to fix them.

No matter how much AI advances, a company cannot replace all of its systems with secure ones overnight.

Attackers accelerate with AI, while defenders are left with traditional systems and organizations.

I suspect that gap will continue to widen.

Complex Passwords Alone No Longer Make Us Safe

Until now, internet security measures have generally meant setting complex passwords and enabling two-factor authentication.

Of course, those measures remain important.

But they are not enough to make us safe.

If the code itself contains a vulnerability before the login process even begins, the complexity of the password is irrelevant.

Methods for impersonating legitimate users and gaining access are also becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Any system exposed to the internet can, by its nature, be probed by anyone in the world.

The entrance is visible not only to legitimate users, but also to attackers.

That leads to an obvious thought: perhaps we should stop making systems accessible to everyone in the first place.

Will the Internet Become a More Closed World?

For example, a company’s critical systems could allow connections only from authorized devices and users.

Restricting the entrance itself reduces the opportunities for unrelated people to attempt an attack.

This approach is already used in enterprise systems.

If AI makes attacks even easier, systems handling important information may increasingly move toward closed networks.

But this approach also has limits.

What if someone who is authorized to connect has malicious intentions?

Or what if that person’s device is compromised?

In the end, no matter how strict the defenses are, perfect security is impossible as long as humans use the system.

Will We Go Back to Paper in the End?

Following this line of thought leads to a slightly extreme idea.

Perhaps truly important information should not be connected to a network at all.

For example, it could be printed on paper and locked in a safe.

Or it could be managed on a computer with no connection whatsoever to the outside world.

At least then, no one could break in over the internet from the other side of the planet.

Of course, paper can be stolen or lost, and systems disconnected from networks have problems of their own.

Even so, we may be starting to move away from an era in which connecting everything to the internet and making it accessible from anywhere were automatically seen as benefits.

After pursuing convenience, we now find ourselves having to restrict that same convenience in order to remain safe.

The irony is hard to miss.

So What Will Happen to My English Lesson?

Even as I think about all of this, the online English lesson website is still undergoing maintenance.

The operator says it is responding to a vulnerability, but if the work is taking this long, the situation must be quite difficult.

When the company’s system stops, there is nothing I can do.

AI may be bringing us into an era in which systems around the world face greater danger than ever before.

And because of the effects of that grand technological transformation, I ended up missing today’s English lesson.

People say AI will take human jobs. I never expected it to take my English lesson time too.