Critical Infrastructure

This section of the website discusses practical issues related to critical infrastructure and what makes it important.

Historically, there has been a tendency to assume that, with information technology, newer is always better.

However, in this world where ransomware attacks can cripple organizations, it's worth discussing whether these assumptions are actually valid.

In April 2025, one of the significant hospitals in the Cayman Islands, Doctor’s Hospital, became the target of a ransomware attack. Attackers were able to compromise their Windows infrastructure, and for a while, all hospital processes had to be done manually; lab results were handed to doctors on pieces of paper, and so on.

The silver lining of this story is that the core patient information system—a product running on OpenVMS—was unaffected by the ransomware attack.

Increasingly, organizations are finding that systems they once considered legacy are, in fact, the most stable and secure parts of their infrastructure. OpenVMS is maintained by a company whose mission is to keep the VMS operating system, originally invented by Digital Equipment Corporation, up-to-date and supported on modern hardware.

This company does not have the dominance of giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Google—and this is actually a good thing. These large corporations face huge commercial growth expectations, which often leads them to add too much functionality and make their platforms complicated and insecure in their drive to expand into new markets.

This part of the website explores why this is so, with examples showing how security is often compromised due to commercial pressures on large vendors. The new security environment has changed the economics of technology platforms, making stability and security more important than any other asset.

Let's start with a example showing how Apple compromises it's customer's security in it's drive to dominate the car market.