The Flight of the Auk
Adaptability: One of the fundamentals of survival is the ability to adapt quickly to a changing landscape.
In June 1844, the last Great Auk was killed, ironically, so it could nest permanently in a dusty museum.
Akin to the Dodo: The Great Auk was a helpless, hapless, flightless bird that bred in colonies on some rocky islands in the North Atlantic. You may never have heard of it. Perhaps, because the sly insult “strong as an Auk” doesn’t sting like “cunning as a Dodo”, and “Auk”, could be linguistically confused with “Ox”.
What Is It: The Great Auk is similar to a penguin: flightless and helpless. Why aren’t the penguins extinct, too? They live in Antarctica. People haven’t gone there in great numbers. For the Auk, they lived on an island used by sailors as a pantry for restocking supplies, like bird meat. Antarctica isn’t somewhere people regularly frequent for the same purpose. It’s inconvenient, and inconvenience to humans may have saved the penguin.
Extinction: Whether Dodo, Great Auk, or Wooly Mammoth, the end was the same—extinction. Extinction due a cataclysmic collision of unfortunate events. The animals had developed defenses ideal for the geographic bubble in which they lived which was a specific geographic ecosystem. Suddenly their bubbles popped. The conditions changed. Their serene world careened into the 19th century, and they lost. They lost because of an inability to adapt.
We Adapt: Humans are different. We don’t adapt to suit our environment. We adapt our environment to suit ourselves. This is our axiom. Now, whether this application of adaptation is a moral one, is not the purpose of this discussion.
Change to Survive: Situations and environments change. Those who most nimbly adapt will survive. The others will not. For a case study, look at Sears. They OWNED the mail-order business. Then came Jeff Bezos in his tiny garage selling books—over the internet. No threat there. Until it was one. It was too late for Sears. Sears SHOULD HAVE owned the online mail-order business. The same way they owned the magazine mail-order world. Like the Great Auk, they failed to recognize a threat. With their ineffective wings and clunky feet, Sears bumbled into the 21st century, failing to adapt quickly when the environment changed.
The Trouble of Inconvenience: For Sears to change its business model would have been inconvenient. People don’t like inconvenience. We develop a bubble of comfortable systems and familiar procedures. We actively reject anything that may disrupt the playful bubble of familiarity.
Hard for the Bad Guys: As defenders of our world, we can use this natural human aversion to personal inconvenience to our advantage. If we make it sufficiently inconvenient for a cyber-criminal to successfully attack us, it may demotivate them and cause them to seek a softer target.
Contact CyberEye – They Know: Unfortunately, this article doesn’t provide the space to list everything you can do to introduce inconvenience into your cyber defense plan. Feel free to contact the Cyber Guys from CyberEye for details.
Recognize the Threat: Both the 19th century Great Auk and the 20th century Great Sears, didn’t recognize the threat early enough. At best, the great Auk could have changed breeding sites to a less convenient location, then decrease the frequency of human interaction. Sears could have bought Amazon’s business model for a few thousand dollars and adapted to it.
Make Adjustments: In 2021, if your business survives the tragedy of COVID, the most likely cause for failure will be a lack of flexibility in your business processes. There is a cyclone of cyber-criminal activity on the near horizon. There are threats we’ve never even considered about to drop anchor just offshore. Sadly, change is the axiom of the cyber-threat landscape.