Situation Normal; There Is No Normal.
I stopped making new year's resolutions a long time ago because I wasn't very good at keeping them. The pressure to maintain the effort became another stressor in my life. You can only fail at losing 15 pounds or daily teeth flossing so many times. I still set yearly goals but they are something that I have developed a plan and a roadmap to achieve.
Making new years resolutions is still popular for others and I have heard many declare their ill-fated intentions over the past few days. One of the most frequent themes I've heard has been the desire to “return to normal” referencing the Covid-19 pandemic and the way it's turned our lives upside-down since 2019.
What is normal at this point? I can only assume the declarants mean a return to life as is it was in December 2019. Do we really want to go back there at this point? And how would we do that? You can't put the past two years back in the bottle.
This longing for “normal” is foreign to those of us that defend against, or investigate cyber-financial crime. The concept of normalcy doesn't exist. Well, other than the bad guys are unrelenting in their attacks and continuously evolving their tactics to defeat us. There isn't a normal because the game is continuously evolving. Much like a virus, ransomware, phishing emails, business email compromise attacks, money laundering methods, and social engineering techniques are continually mutating in response to the tactics of security and law enforcement. There are new variants every day! The theme may be the same but the characters and their schemes are ever changing.
We never have the desire to return to normal because there is no normal. Normal is chaos. Everyday.
Welcome to 2022 and another year of combating cyber-financial crime. Normalcy is not an option.