The breach at JBS (the world’s largest meat processor) was the second recent such attack to freeze up a critical U.S. business operation. Just last month, another ransomware attack was made on Colonial Pipeline (they transport gas to nearly half the East Coast) which triggered a shortage through panic buying of gas and jet-fuel. Loo rolls, however, were un-affected.
The Fastly outage affected websites across the Atlantic from the White House to Gov.uk but not the good old BBC because they had a back-up in place. It just goes to show how vulnerable we all are when IT systems fail.
It is interesting how many parallels there are to IT system security and following coronavirus guidelines. You can keep washing your hands, wear a mask and practice social distancing – may not even have symptoms, but you can still catch COVID. In many attacks, organisations have no idea how their systems were infiltrated – anyone can get caught out and there is no room for complacency.
The first computer virus I properly remember, was the Michelangelo virus. It was expected to create a digital apocalypse with millions of computers affected. But the damage was minimal. John McAfee was quoted as saying that 5 million computers would be affected. He later confessed that he estimated from 5K to 5M but the media jumped on the higher number – something to be cognisant of even now. And whilst not a virus who remembers the hysteria round Y2K?
At the time, we were terrified our computers would get infected but then along came Peter Norton and Dr Solomonn who were legends of their time.
Over the years there have been some nasty viruses: I Love You (clearly not),StormWorm, Anna Kournikova (so called because at the time it was one of the most searched terms on the internet), MyDoom and CryptoLocker. Scary to note that many of these were created by teenagers but, just like Coronavirus, the effect these Malware, Bots, Zombies, Worms and Trojans can have on businesses can be crippling.
For more on security see our blog Getting Serious about Security – ReInforce Technology