The New York Stock Exchange is down and United Airlines is not flying for half a day. Naturally, everyone’s wondering, What’s going on? The public wants an explanation from the FBI and the affected institutions, and fast.
The response is quite astounding.
Voila! Cyber security problem solved: from now on all hacks are to be called “computer glitches.” United and the NYSE computer network outages are only the latest glaring examples of a classic bureaucratic solution to the problem – defense by semantics.
This “expert” explanation means two things: a) it’s a fairytale designed for little children and big fools; and b) the “cyber security experts” of the affected entities and the FBI probably have no clue as to what happened. That’s a very good indication of an expertly executed cyber attack – the effect is obvious but the attack has not even been detected — and forget figuring out that “the Chinese” or the “the Russians” did it. Because it is really unfathomable to imagine that programmers working on critical programs like these found “glitches.” Such programs are written and implemented by highly qualified programmers and software engineers and are tested numerous times under all imaginable circumstances. Furthermore, they’ve been running for quite some time with no “glitches” detected, and all those systems have built-in redundancies precisely in case of a “glitch.”
The “glitch” explanation is very convenient for those who failed to provide cybersecurity of this country.
All these events are a clear indication of our massive cyber security failure. This failure was inevitable. On the one hand in the last quarter century widely known cyber attack technology has advanced dramatically, and is becoming increasingly widespread. What a while ago only a few government agencies in the world could do can now be done by a lot of people, often by mere script kiddies, and certainly by our sworn enemies who aren’t restricted in what they can attack—the more damage the better. On the other hand, our cyber security has not advanced at all for the same quarter of a century. This is the inconvenient truth, despite of all the marketing and politically soothing statements from the entrenched cybersecurity establishment.
It is really sad that people responsible and paid for providing our cyber security are getting away with this cyber defense by semantics. No doubt the next step is to make the term “hacking” politically incorrect and make everyone use “computer glitch” instead. When that fairy tale runs out, they’ll think of another term. That’s assuming our computers are still functioning.