As you may have heard recently, someone hacked into the refrigeration systems of various shops, thawing their meat products, so they had to be thrown way.

Reasonably enough, lots of people are asking whether the next attack could be on a nuclear power station, air traffic control system or something.

In my last job before retiring, I worked in IT for an Insurance company and, hence was at the doom and gloom end of the character spectrum. Even with a more realistic view, from my experience of multiple hacking attempts over the years, I think those things actually aren’t all that far from being possible

There is good News here though:

For some reason, I actually read the manual of our last vacuum cleaner when we bought it and saw you could actually connect to the Internet via your Wifi.

Not all that long ago, when the Internet of Things was all the rage. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would bother remotely connecting to a thing that you had to be there to push around. I did play around and connected it to see what would happen – which was nothing, other than viewing reports of how many hours I spend cleaning (which is none)

It’s still connected though so, if I rename it from ‘Dave’s vacuum’ to ‘Sizewell B’, it might trick hackers and distract them from targets that could do real harm.

This might work and could avert a nuclear disaster but the world will never know of my heroic act.

If I report any unexpected or freaky cleaning incidents in future though, you can probably assume I did make the supreme sacrifice of generally messing up our house, in favour of all your ongoing survival.

This achievement may not go down in history like the discovery of Penicillin but I’m fine just to accept my contribution to human survival will be something I just sit smugly and enjoy all by myself.