The Constant Babysitting of Tech

I have to rant for a moment.

With work and life-related tasks and errands, I don’t have much time to blog, so when I sit down to my computer, the last thing I want to do is babysit the tech. Yet, increasingly, that’s what I need to do.

By babysitting the tech, I mean doing updates and security logins or troubleshooting problems.

I seem to be doing all of these things more and more.

I have a security program on my blog that tracks failed login attempts. I recently discovered several failed logins with my username, which was an unusual name … not something easily guessable. I thought that was strange because I don’t typically fail at logging into my blog, so these weren’t my failed logins. The more I thought about it, the more I figured there has to be some way for others to find that username somewhere, particularly if you understand the WordPress ecosystem. WordPress is a very common website platform, so even if you don’t know how to find the username, you can do an online search and get instructions.

Well, I decided to update my username to see if I could keep whoever was using it from trying to brute force their way in.

That didn’t work. My security program caught that there were several failed attempts to login with the new username within a day of changing it.

I updated my password to be on the safe side. And then I activated multi-factor authentication.

Hopefully, these changes will keep my website safe, however, it takes time to use these extra login steps, particularly when you multiply multi-factor authentication across many websites. Increasingly, due to the sophistication of hackers and the use of AI, we have to engage in these extra security measures to keep our information safe online.

This month, for Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released over 1,400 patches for security vulnerabilities, an all-time record. They’ve been shattering their patch records almost every month since June of this year, when they had over 200 patches, because AI is finding bugs and other vulnerabilities that were never caught before. It’s these sorts of vulnerabilities that require the constant babysitting of tech.

However, at what point do we get so swamped in security measures that we never get around to using our tech for what it was meant for?

Computers are marvelous creative tools for writers and artists, as well as practical tools for those who want to do bookkeeping or handle other business tasks. But, if we constantly have to babysit our tech, what good is it anymore? Where have its conveniences gone?

I don’t have any answers to that, but my rant is over for today. 🙂

Have you noticed you’re babysitting your tech more? How do you manage tech maintenance and still get something done with it?