THE BOMBS AWAY

Bloody hell!!

Forty eight NHS trusts and now affecting 150 countries, though I'm not sure if it's also health services, this is turning into something else entirely.

This cyber-attack consisting of ransomware across the NHS has really escalated into something huge.

So radicals with backpacks that explode and now cyber-attacks on a huge scale are the treats the West is facing.

But argued like hell they did that what we need are very expensive armed forces, submarines, aircraft carriers and most importantly, nuclear weapons.

I feared years ago that a misappropriation of money was heading our way through sheer blindness and incompetence.

Well ... at least we're not alone?

Except I'm not speaking about intelligent life out there in the universe. No, with no less than 150 countries also being affected it seems many others have had tunnel vision when it comes to imagining what the future will bring.

Russia being one was something of a surprise as was the very small amount that was demanded in the ransom.

I do wonder if this actually turned out to be much bigger than the creator of the ransomware intended? Due to the small amount demanded.

Unless of course it was intended that it would be £300 per health trust per country? That would have added to to a fair amount I'm guessing?

It's going to be interesting over the next five years because we're simply not getting out of this financial slump. It's also becoming clearer to more and more people that there is no money. Despite the fact they are still flinging it about overseas and awarding themselves large chunks of the rare stuff.

There are also other problems for the UK when it comes to the Internet. It's one America doesn't have and China did but has been slowly doing something about it.

It's one that we don't have when it comes to banking and if, more likely when, we lose that .. were in big trouble.

It's shite anyway, the banking industry, but we've relied too much on it and being in a financial crisis  .. well .. anything can happen.

We've gradually lost industries and America has sent much of their manufacturing overseas. So the problems that affect us are kinda similar. I guess we might have been better off as we sold all ours and got paid for it. Whereas America set theirs to overseas due to cheap labour and bringing it back is going to be both painful and expensive. Not to mention time consuming.

But neither of those two paths should have been taken. It was decided with greed as the largest factor.

The point when a workforce of one nation has to be traded for another something is seriously, seriously wrong. It should have been taken for a sign that something was slowly going wrong.

It should also have been bloody obvious that using the workforce of an overseas nation would not last forever.

Two things occur when you train a workforce overseas ...

First your training them, so after ten years of experience they can do off and set to a company off their own to do the same thing.

Secondly and as time goes by those underpaid workers, come on admit it .. it's why they did it on the first place, expect and demand higher wages. Eventually it becomes more expensive to manufacture your items overseas. The wages paid overseas doesn't even have to become equal to those back home. Because you have shipping costs for huge numbers of these products.

We may not have reached this flipping point yet with any workforce, or we may have with some? But it will get there one day and that's something I simply cannot see anyone avoiding.

That brings us to the worst case scenario of all in these instances. The workforce in an overseas country becoming more expensive than a workforce back home along with warehouses 50 miles from the overseas manufacturing making the same product. Then selling it at a tenth to a fifth of the price.

If I was going to make a prediction of the most likely brand to suffer this would be Apple. Thought their operating system is likely to be their saving grace.

But not everything has an operating system to make things difficult.

Hmm I made the remark, only really used to show contrast, about the armed forces and weapons earlier in this post. Yeah well there are claims that even weapons have been copied all the way up to that of an aircraft.

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it: Ransomware cyber-attack threat escalating - Europol - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39913630