The Scattered Spider Boys

The Scattered Spider Boys came quiet, like a wind through the dry grass, invisible until the damage was done. They weren’t dusty farm hands or seasonal fruit pickers but the children of energy drinks, slim devices and code flickering screens. They were nimble-fingered and mean-eyed, coaxing secrets out of machines like a man might coax water from a dry well. They talked their way into systems with the same smooth patience a gambler might use at a crooked card table. Social engineers and scavenger hunters they called themselves, though there was little in the way of art or plain old hunger in what they did. Big firms with big gates and taller walls still found their vaults clean and empty and their names blackened. Their managers stood clueless. No code was too neat, no password too long for them to whisper their way past and steal the bread from the Co-op's shelves and the children's mouths.

To stop them, you can't just build walls higher or install tougher locks. No, it takes vigilance, the kind that doesn’t sleep. Teach the men and women who tend the systems not to trust voices on the wire, not to click the glinting lure of a message too sweet to be true. Multi-factor it like a farmer double bolts his barn. Monitor like the man who knows a storm’s always out there, just beyond the hills. And patch, by God, patch sweetly, like you're mending a fence before the cattle find the gap. It’s a hard kind of labour, the kind that doesn’t yield easy thanks, but it’s the only way to keep the systems safe from those who come like ghosts into the circuitry. Then again if you're old school like me you might try just switching it off and on and taking a fifteen minute smoke break.