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Are you sick of cybersecurity warnings and
annoying digital security measures?
a worldwide high crime neighborhood,
out of which it is very hard to move.
Public-interest technology, information security, data privacy, risk and gender issues in tech
Welcome to Online (see Alt text for credit) |
Painting: An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store, by Daniel MacDonald |
In a column titled "Of Potatoes and Worms" we used the classic example of monoculture—the Irish Potato Famine—to explain why relying on one company or one operating system for all your IT needs creates a potentially catastrophic level of vulnerability to software-specific threats, such as as computer worms, viruses, supply chains attacks, and of course, bugs in software updates (c.f. Crowdstrike). We hope you find it helpful.
During the last two weeks, the world has witnessed hundreds of thousands of computer systems falling prey to worms. As we write this, the Sobig-F worm is reaching epidemic proportions, threatening to rival the 2000 Love Bug outbreak in terms of disruption wrought. We give you just one example, a good friend of ours who headed to France this week for a vacation: after the flight from LA to Paris he turned on his handheld computer to check email and found 500 infected messages waiting.
A lot has been written on this topic, but we haven’t seen many references lately to the “potato famine theory” of information system insecurity. This theory is a favorite of ours and it holds that a lack of diversity in software can be a dangerous thing, at either the enterprise or the national level. This might ring some bells right now if you are a CIO responsible for tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows or Outlook users.
The theory gets its name from a tragic chain of events that struck the island of Ireland in 1845, killing—by some estimates—more than a million people. At that time, potatoes were the primary source of food for most people living there, due to the fact that potatoes produce more calories per acre than another other crop you can grow in that climate (back then, most people did not have a lot of land to work with because land use was controlled by English landlords, many of whom were, to say the very least, selfish).
In fact, almost all the potatoes grown in Ireland at that time were of one particular strain, a strain that had been found to produce the most calories per acre. So when a potato fungus arrived in Ireland—possibly from somewhere in the Americas—its impact on the crop was exacerbated by the lack of diversity among potato strains. While some potato strains are more resistant to the fungus than others, the dominant strain in Ireland at that time was not one of them. [See: Great Famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)]
The information system security analogy is this: reliance by an information system on one application or operating system, to the exclusion of others, [a monoculture] reduces the ability of that system to survive a vulnerability in that operating system or application.
Consider an organization that is using nothing but Microsoft products versus one that uses a mix of applications and operating systems. The Microsoft-only shop is more likely to have experienced widespread negative effects due to last week’s Blaster worm (which exploited a security hole in the Windows operating system) and this week’s Sobig-F worm (which exploits a Microsoft Outlook vulnerability)
We’re not sure how many people today are familiar with the Irish potato famine, so “fossil fuel dependence theory” might be a better term. The implications are the same: dependence on a single source of energy, or software, has inherent risks. What we particularly like about both analogies is that they encompass economics and politics as well as strategy and logistics.
The Irish were not growing that single dominant strain of potato because it tasted better than others—apparently it did not—they were growing it because the politics and economics of the time made maximum yield appear to be the highest good. America’s dependence on fossil fuel and a single source of software also has economic and political elements (prices have been relatively low, producers politically powerful, and so on).
Obviously, the dominance of Microsoft products in operating system and application areas has its own economic and political angles. However, while the reasons for Microsoft’s dominance, and the extent of the negative impact of that dominance on other companies, have been hotly debated, very few people have voiced the following argument: Regardless of how secure or insecure Microsoft software is—or has been, or becomes—we think that using it, or any other single source, to the virtual exclusion of all others, will never be good security.
In other words, even if Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing initiative succeeds in making the company’s products more secure than they are right now, it would still be foolhardy for any organization to adopt them as a universal standard. Unfortunately, our opinion is not shared by the Department of Homeland Security and other 3LA’s that had best remain nameless.
And just to show how fair and balanced our coverage is, we will say the same of Adobe’s Acrobat format. This grows more powerful with each version. We use it. We love it’s convenience and the fact that most people with whom we communicate can read Acrobat documents. But the extent to which some government agencies are relying on it is now approaching scary.
Notes:
1. Portions of this column first appeared in a lecture we delivered in 2002 as part of the Master of Science program in Information Assurance at Norwich University, Vermont.
2. Crowdstrike has assured customers and the public that their software update, which led to the global IT outage of July 19, 2024, was not malicious. However, it is remains to be seen if this assertion will be confirmed by independent analysis.
3. The attack technique of placing malicious code in a software update has been used for many years, notably in the 2017 Wannacry incident that took down hundreds if thousands of systems and cost companies billions of dollars. Ironically, Wannacry did not impact organizations that were protected by some brands of endpoint protection software, the same category of software as Crowdstrike Falcon. [Disclaimer: In 2017, I was working for ESET, one of those brands that stopped Wannacry.]
Internet crime losses 2014-2023, as reported to IC3/FBI, and compiled by S. Cobb |
About the only good thing you can say about this news is that the annual Internet crime loss figure rose by only 22% in 2023. That is less than half the 49% increase in in 2022, which was well below the 64% surge in 2021. However, before anyone gets too optimistic, take another look at the chart at the top of the page.
While there have been several years this century in which rate of increase in losses to Internet crime has slowed down, I see the general direction over the last decade as fairly relentlessly upward. And this is despite record levels of spending on cybersecurity and cybercrime deterrence.
This time last year I discussed the implications of these trends in an article over on LinkedIn. That was written in the hope that more people will pay attention to the increasingly dire state of Internet crime prevention and deterrence, and how that impacts ordinary people. At the start of this year, I wrote about the implications of digitally-enabled fraud reaching record levels, framing this as a public health crisis.
During 2023, I delivered and recorded a well-received talk on cybercrime as a public health crisis. Here is the video, hosted on YouTube.
The talk was originally delivered at the Technical Summit and Researchers Sync-Up 2023 in Ireland. The event was organized by the European arm of APWG, the global Anti-Phishing Working Group. (Talks at that event were not recorded, so I made this recording myself; sadly, it lacks the usual gesticulation and audience interaction of my live delivery, but on the plus side you can speed up the playback on YouTube.)
Also sad is the fact that, due to carer/caregiver commitments, I had to cancel delivery of the next stage of my research at APWG's Symposium on Electronic Crime Research 2023 (eCrime 2023).
On the bright side, I did manage to write up my ideas in an article on Medium: Do Online Access Imperatives Violate Duty of Care? There I started building my case that exposure to crime online causes harm even to those who are not directly victimized by it, much in the same way that living in a high crime neighbourhood has been proven—by criminologists and epidemiologists—to be bad for human health. Basically, the article made four assertions:
To explain these assertions I introduced my "Five levels of crime impact in meatspace and cyberspace" which are captured in this table:
I also introduced my take on a concept used by environmental exposure scientists and epidemiologists: the exposome. A key role of the exposome is to help us acknowledge and account for everything to which we are exposed in our daily lives that may affect our health.Every AI is an information system and every information system has fundamental vulnerabilities that make it susceptible to attack and abuse.
Internet crime losses reported to IC3/FBI |
You can't trust what ChatGPT says |
The term "jackware" was coined by two researchers, Stefan Savage and Tadayoshi Kohno, in a 2016 paper titled "Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile". In the paper, Savage and Kohno described a proof-of-concept attack in which they were able to take control of a car's electronic systems using a laptop computer. They used the term "jackware" to describe a new class of malware that could be used to take control of vehicles in a similar way to how ransomware is used to take control of computer systems.
Frankly, at first glance this looks like is a very impressive answer: it names names and cites an academic source, while providing a helpful description of jackware, all articulated in grammatically correct English. It's way more helpful than the output of a plain old search. You can see why so many people get so excited about artificial intelligence.
But sadly, several key facts in ChatGPT's answer are just plain wrong, so wrong that you could be in serious trouble with your teacher-editor-readers if you pasted that paragraph of ChatGPT output into a piece of work. For a start, anyone familiar with the subject matter would know that you hadn't read that paper.
The academic paper to which ChaGPT refers was published in 2010, not 2016. You can see that from this listing of the paper. This is not just a pedantic quibble; the named paper is legendary in the world of automotive cybersecurity, partly because it was published way back in 2010. It documents groundbreaking work done by Savage et al. in the 2000s, way before the flashy Jeep hack of 2015 by Miller and Valasek.
More blatantly erroneous is the identification of this 2010 paper and its authors as the source of the term jackware. Simply put, the paper does not contain the word jackware. In fact, the person who coined the term jackware to describe malicious code used to take over vehicles, was me, Stephen Cobb, and I did that in May of 2016, on this blog, in a post titled: Jackware: coming soon to a car or truck near you?
In July of 2016, I penned Jackware: When connected cars meet ransomware for We Live Security, the award-winning global cybersecurity blog. As further evidence, I present exhibit A, which shows how you can iterative time-constrained searches to identify when something first appears. Constraining the search to the years 1998 to 2015, we see that no relevant mention of jackware was found prior to 2016:Apparently, jackware had been used as a collective noun for leather mugs, but there are no software-related search results before 2016. Next you can see that, when the search is expanded to include 2016, the We Live Security article tops the results:
So how did ChatGPT get things so wrong? The simple answer is that ChatGPT doesn't know what it's talking about. What it does know is how to string relevant words and numbers together in a plausible way. Stefan Savage is definitely relevant to car hacking. The year 2016 is relevant because that's when jackware was coined. And the research paper that ChatGPT referenced does contain numerous instances of the word jack. Why? Because the researchers wisely tested their automotive computer hacks on cars that were on jack stands.
To be clear, ChatGPT is not programmed to use a range of tools to make sure it is giving you the right answer. For example, it didn't perform an iterative time-constrained online search like the one I did in order to find the first use of a new term.
Hopefully, this example will help people see what I think is a massive gap between the bold claims made for artificial intelligence and the plain fact that AI is not yet intelligent in a way that equates to human intelligence. That means you cannot rely on ChatGPT to give you the right answer to your questions.
So what happens if we do get to a point where people rely—wisely or not—on AI? That's when AI will be maliciously targeted and abused by criminals, just like every other computer system, something I have written about here.
Ironically, the vulnerability of AI to abuse can be both a comfort to those who fear AI will exterminate humans, and a nightmare for those who dream of a blissful future powered by AI. In my opinion, the outlook for AI, at least for the next few decades, is likely to be a continuation of the enthusiasm-disillusionment cycle, with more AI winters to come.
Note 1: For more on those AI dreams and fears, I should first point out that they are based on expectations that the capabilities of AI will evolve from their current level to a far more powerful technology referred to as Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. For perspective on this, I recommend listening to "Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence" by two of my Twitter friends, @timnitGebru and @xriskology. This is a good introduction the relationship between AI development and a bundle of beliefs/ideals/ideas known as TESCREAL: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism.
Note 2: When I first saw Google assume jackware was a typo for Jaguar I laughed out loud because I was born and raised in Coventry, England, the birthplace of Jaguar cars. In 2019, when my mum, who lives in Coventry, turned 90, Chey and I moved here, and that's where I am writing this. Jaguars are a common sight in our neighbourhood, not because it's a posh part of the city, but because a lot of folks around here work at Jaguar and have company cars.
This increase, which comes on top of a 64% surge from 2020 to 2021, has serious implications for companies and consumers who use the Internet, as well as for law enforcement and government.
Those implications are discussed in an article that I wrote over on LinkedIn in the hope that more people will pay attention to the increasingly dire state of Internet crime prevention and deterrence, and how that impacts people. In that article I also discuss the growing awareness that Internet crime creates even more harm than is reflected in the financial losses suffered by victims. There is mounting evidence—some of which I cite in the article—that the health and wellbeing of individuals hit by online fraud suffers considerably, even in cases of attempted fraud where no financial loss occurs.
One UK study estimated the value of this damage at the equivalent of more than $4,000 per victim. Consider what happens if we round down the number of cases reported in the IC3/FBI annual summary for 2020 to 800,000, then assume that number reflects a fifth of the actual number of cases in which financial loss occurred. That's 4 million cases. Now assume those cases were one tenth of the attempted online crimes and multiply that 40 million by the $4,000 average hit to health and wellbeing estimated by researchers. The result is $160 billion, and that's just for one year; a huge amount of harm to individuals and society.
A school of baitfish forming a ball to reduce predation (Shutterstock) |
In other words, despite all the efforts of bad actors, from local scammers to nation states, abusing all manner of digital technologies, to commit everything from petty crimes to war crimes, humans are surviving, and we are continuing to expand our reliance on said technologies.
Of course, this lesson would appear to offer little comfort to the victims of digital crime in 2022, the countless companies, consumers, non-profit organizations, and government entities that lost money and peace of mind to the hordes of ethically challenged and maliciously motivated perpetrators of cyber-badness.*
Baitball and a swordfish (Shutterstock) |
For example, small fish that spend most of their lives in the open ocean form a tight group when predators approach; then they swirl around in a ball to make it harder for predators to select targets. I wrote about this phenomenon—the baitball—in a recent article on LinkedIn.
So, the good news for 2022 is that we can head into 2023 knowing that the world can survive a large amount of ongoing cyberbadness. We have seen that levels of criminal abuse of digital technology can rise quite high without resulting in the breakdown of society.
(You could even argue that cybercrime is falling in relation to the growing number of criminal opportunities created by the ongoing deployment of new digital technologies and devices, but that's for a different article.)
The bad news is that surviving is not as enjoyable and fulfilling as thriving. Living just this side of the breakdown of society means the other side is a looming presence, a constant stress factor, as is the knowledge that any one of us could be the next cybercrime victim.
So what will it take to get from surviving to thriving, to a state in which cybercrime is either eliminated or reduced to a manageable level? Unfortunately, the short answer is: it will take a lot. The countries of the world need to agree to, and enforce, norms of ethical behaviour in the digital realm. If that sounds almost impossible given the current state of the world, then you have a measure of how much effort it is going to take to eliminate cybercrime or reduce it to a manageable level. However, it should be noted that the idea of reducing crime to a manageable level is not unprecedented.
Shopkeepers learned long ago that it is almost impossible to stop their stock from shrinking. Some employees will swipe stock from the stockroom. Some customers will shoplift. Furthermore, some vendors will over-charge and under-deliver. Taken together, these money-losing phenomena are known as shrinkage.
Despite efforts to reduce shrinkage, including the use of technology, it still cuts into retail revenue in America to the tune of 1.5% per year on average, equating to losses in the order of $100 billion in 2021. Nevertheless, despite shrinkage, the retail sector keeps going. Retailers don't expect to eliminate shrinkage, but they will spend time and money on measures to keep it to a relatively low percentage.
So what are the prospects for reducing the impact of cybercrime to a very low level, perhaps a very small percentage of GDP? I honestly don't know. We are still a long way from getting a full picture of cybercrime's impact; this is particularly true of the psychological and health impacts. There are hidden social and economic costs as well, given the not insignificant percentage of people who don't go online due to fear of cybercrime.
Some would argue that the term cybercrime is becoming problematic in discussions like this, given that most predatory crime today has "cyber" aspects. Fortunately, there is plenty of evidence that people who commit predatory crime can stop, and many do so as they get older, start families, get a "proper" job. In criminology this is known as desistance and may actually be easier for people with digital skills to desist.
In the broad scheme of things, the most intractable obstacle to reducing cyberbadness may not be predatory criminals clinging to a crooked lifestyle; it could well be humans who are prepared to use digital technologies like social media to spread disinformation, undermine truth, and foster hatred in furtherance of selfish agendas.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, the term cyber-badness was first coined by Cameron Camp, my friend and colleague at ESET.
The Stephen Cobb Complete Book of PC and LAN Security first appeared in print in 1992, an amazing 30 years ago. In celebration of this anniversary, I'm reminding people that a PDF copy of the last version of the book is freely downloadable under a Creative Commons license.
While a lot of the book's technical content is now dated—a polite way of saying it is stuck in the late 1990s and thus mainly of historical interest—much of the theory and strategy still rings true
The large file size of this 700 page tome led me to publish it in three easily digestible parts: Part One; Part Two; and Part Three. (You can also scroll down the column on the right of this page for download inks.)
Despite the original title, which was imposed by the publisher, the volume that appeared 30 years ago was by no means a "complete book" on the subject; nor is it now a contemporary guide. However, you can still find it on Amazon, even though Amazon.com did not exist when the first version was published. The images on the left of this article are the current Amazon listings of the three versions (which I will explain shortly)."The goal of personal computer security is to protect and foster the increased creativity and productivity made possible by a technology that has so far flourished with a minimum of controls, but which finds itself increasingly threatened by the very openness that led to its early success. To achieve this goal, you must step from an age of trusting innocence into a new era of realism and responsibility, without lurching into paranoia and repression."I'd say that's a decent piece of prognostication for 1992. It's one of the reasons I have kept the book available all these years, a mix of nostalgia, history, and first principles. Along with a number of friends and fellow security professionals—like Winn Schwartau, Bruce Schneier, and Jeff Moss—I am inclined to think that the parlous state of cybersecurity in 2022, relative to the level of cybercriminal activity, could have been avoided is only more people had taken our advice more seriiously in the 1990s.
LEGAL STUFF: THIS FREE ELECTRONIC EDITION IS LICENSED BY THE AUTHOR FOR USE UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS, ATTRIBUTION, NONCOMMERCIAL, NO DERIVATES.
"The most cost-effective long-term approach to personal computer security is the promotion of mature and responsible attitudes among users. Lasting security will not be achieved by technology, nor by constraints on those who use it. True security can only be achieved through the willing compliance of users with universally accepted principles of behavior. Such compliance will increase as society as a whole becomes increasingly computer literate, and users understand the personal value of the technology they use."
IC3/FBI internet crime data graphed by S. Cobb |
Losses to individual and business victims of internet crime in 2020 exceeded $4 billion according to the recently published 2020 Internet Crimes Report from the FBI and IC3; this represents a 20% increase over losses reported in 2019. The number of complaints also rose dramatically, up nearly 70%.
IC3/FBI internet crime data graphed by S. Cobb |
When the 2019 Internet Crimes Report was published in February of 2020 it documented "$3.5 billion in losses to individual and business victims."
What I said back then, about the loss number that I expected to see in the 2020 report, was this: "I certainly wouldn't bet against it blowing through $4 billion"
(Here's a link to the article where I said that).
Quite frankly, I'm not the least bit happy that I was right. Just as I take no pleasure in having been right for each of the last 20 years, when my annual response to "what does the year ahead look like for cybersecurity?" has been to say, with depressingly consistent accuracy: it's going to get worse before it gets better. As I see it, a 20% annual increase in losses to internet crime, despite record levels of spending on cybersecurity, is a clear indicator that current strategies for securing our digital world against criminal activity are not working.
However, like many cybersecurity professionals, I have always had an optimistic streak, a vein of hope compressed deep beneath the bedrock of my experience. (Periodically, we have to mine this hope to counter the urge to throw up our hands and declare: "We're screwed! Let's just go make music.")
So let me offer a small shred of hope.
I am honor bound to point out that cybercrime's impact last year may not have been as bad I had come to expect. Yes, at the start of 2020 I predicted that cybercrime would maintain its steep upward trajectory. I said the IC3/FBI loss number for 2020 would pass $4 billion and it did. But then "the Covid effect" kicked in, generating scores of headlines about criminal exploitation of the pandemic in both cyberspace and meatspace. And behind each of those headlines were thousands of victims experiencing a range of distressing psychological impacts and economic loss.
By the end of 2020 I was predicting that the IC3/FBI number could be as high as $4.7 billion (see my December, 2020, article: Cybersecurity had a rough 2020). In that context, the reported 2020 number of $4.2 billion was "better than expected." Indeed, the year-on-year increase from 2019 to 2020 of 20% was not as bad as the 2018-2019 increase of 29%.
However, when I look at the graph at the top of this article I'm not yet ready to say things are improving. And I'm very aware that every one of the 791,790 complaints of suspected internet crime that the IC3 catalogued in 2020—an increase of more than 300,000 from 2019—signifies a distressing incident that negatively impacted the victim, and often their family and friends as well.
In 2020, the pandemic proved to be a very criminogenic phenomenon. I'm pretty sure it also generated greater public awareness of statistical terms like growth curves, rolling averages, trend lines, dips, and plateaus. Right now I see no reason to think cybercrime will dip or even plateau in 2021. But let's hope I'm wrong and in the months and years to come there is a turnaround in the struggle to reduce to the abuse of digital technologies, hopefully before my vein of optimism is all mined out.
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that there are issues with using the IC3 numbers as crime metrics. For a start, they are not collected as an exercise in crime metrics, but rather as part of one avenue of attack against the crimes they represent, an issue I addressed in this law journal article. However, I have studied each IC3 annual report and am satisfied that collectively they reflect real world trends in cybercrime's impact on victims, as measured by direct monetary lost (the psychological impact of internet crime creates other costs, to victims and society, but so far we have done a woefully poor job of measuring those).Note:
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How to secure your Ring camera and account
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21030147/how-to-secure-ring-camera-account-amazon-set-up-2fa-password-strength-hack
Ring security camera settings
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ring-security-camera-settings
Video doorbell security: How to stop your smart doorbell from being hacked
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/smart-video-doorbells/article/video-doorbell-security-how-to-stop-your-smart-doorbell-from-being-hacked-aCklb4Y4rZnw
How the WYZE camera can be hacked
https://learncctv.com/can-the-wyze-camera-be-hacked/
How to secure your WYZE security camera account
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/wyze-camera-data-leak-how-to-secure-your-account-right-now/
How to protect 'smart' security cameras and baby monitors from cyber attack
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/smart-security-cameras-using-them-safely-in-your-home
Yes, your security camera could be hacked: Here's how to stop spying eyes
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/yes-your-security-camera-could-be-hacked-heres-how-to-stop-spying-eyes/
On a related topic, and as a way to understand how hackers look for vulnerabilities in digital devices, check out this article at Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/2019/03/28/reverse-engineering-a-modern-ip-camera/. It links to a cool, four-part reverse engineering exercise by Alex Oporto: https://dalpix.com/reverse-engineering-ip-camera-part-1
Note:
If you found this page interesting or helpful or both, please consider clicking the button below to buy me a coffee and support a good cause, while fueling more independent research and ad-free content like this. Thanks!
For this Day Privacy Day—January 28, 2021—I have put together an assortment of items, suggested resources and observations that might prove helpful.
The first item is time-sensitive: a live streamed virtual privacy day event: Data Privacy in an Era of Global Change. The event begins at Noon, New York time, 5PM London time, and features a wide range of excellent speakers. This is the latest iteration of an annual event organized by the National Cyber Security Alliance that going back at least seven years, each one live streamed.
The 2014 event included me on a panel at Pew Research in D.C., along with Omer Tene of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), plus John Gevertz, Global Chief Privacy Officer of ADP, and Erin Egan, CPO of Facebook (which arranged the live streaming).
In 2015, I was on another Data Privacy Day panel, this one focused on medical data and health privacy. It featured Peter Swire who was heavily involved in the creation of the HIPAA. By request, I told the story of Frankie and Jamie, "A Tale of Medical Fraud" that involved identity theft with serious data privacy implications.Also on the panel were: Anne Adams, Chief Compliance & Privacy Officer for Emory Healthcare; Pam Dixon Executive Director of the World Privacy Forum, and Hilary M. Wandall, CPO of Merck—the person to whom I was listening very carefully in this still from the recorded video on Vimeo (which is still online but I could not get it to play):
The second item is The Circle, both the 2013 novel by Dave Eggers—my fairly lengthy review of which appears here—and the 2017 movie starring Emily Watson and Tom Hanks, the trailer for which should be playable below.
Moving from privacy laws to privacy realities, like the intersection of privacy, poverty, and privilege, here are a number of thought-provoking articles you might want to read:
Finally, getting back to a point raised earlier in this post, one that comes up every Data Privacy Day, here is my 2018 article "Data Privacy vs. Data Protection: Reflecting on Privacy Day and GDPR."
P.S. If you're on Twitter you might enjoy what I've been tweeting about #DataPrivacyDay.
Note:
If you found this page interesting or helpful or both, please consider clicking the button below to buy me a coffee and support a good cause, while fueling more independent research and ad-free content like this. Thanks!