The Border Crossings in Severe Freezing Conditions Are a Reminder That Scandinavia Needs to Urgently Dump Microsoft
The Microsoft back doors are a blessing for hybrid warriors at times of covert (e.g. by proxy) warfare
THE Russian government (i.e. Vladimir Putin and his crony army) has begun aggression at the Finnish border, in effect weaponising desperate people. This isn't classic hybrid warfare and there's no simple solution to it. What next? Attacks on pipes, grids, and computer systems? Russia is casually being accused of having already started this too (sophisticated attacks are hard to prove/trace back to the perpetrator/s), emboldened by Finland's excessive reliance on Microsoft (which means plenty of back doors open for exploitation by anybody, including crackers based near Moscow).
So where is the region when it comes to "IT"? If it positioned to handle "cyberattacks"? With Microsoft, an attack is presumed a successful breach, whereas UNIX-like systems are robust and can deter such attacks rather effectively because of their inherent structure (how they're built from the ground up). Windows was never designed for security. It is a snooping platform. It was designed for a single user not connected to a network; everything beyond this is a 'hack' made of spaghetti code. Microsoft pays (bribes) the media to frame Microsoft as some sort of security guru with a suite of "addons", but Microsoft is exactly the opposite. There's ample evidence to show this every week.
Is Finland ready or genuinely prepared to endure digital assaults from Russian nodes or proxies of theirs?
Considering business and residential machines for the most part, many people (statCounter now says 6% on the desktop/laptop) use GNU/Linux and Chrome OS (3.52% and 2.73%, respectively) and Microsoft lost share in search since the whole chatbot hype. YANDEX is apparently used about 1% of the time or by a hundredth of the Finnish people in the survey. Firefox has maintained relatively high share (or maybe that's just pure noise; in Norway, which shares a border with Russia at the north, Firefox seems like it stayed high at about a third of the whole, but the chart is all over the place, so it's almost definitely wrong). Anyway, any use of YANDEX is an information warfare risk; it's more dangerous than home routers, but probably not as dangerous as Beijing's Bytedance, especially Fentanylware (TikTok). Government advice should prioritise the risks; removing Microsoft should be utmost priority. Don't wait for loads of ransomware attacks and grid shutdowns. There was already one major energy incident last week, resulting in loss of power and price hikes when people rely on heating the most. We put that several times in Daily Links.
Norway seems better positioned to cope with electronic/digital warfare. With GNU/Linux at 17.3% (fluctuates too much though) and ChromeOS at about 3%, there's not much Windows.
Sweden has ChromeOS at 10% and YANDEX at 0.2% (same as Denmark where Apple does reasonably well), but there's no land border with Russia. It's easier to smuggle people through land than using boats (beaching can be proactively averted). █
