The mass IT outages that hit America and the world very early this morning are emphatically not the work of a malign foreign actor. This was not a cyberattack. CrowdStrike, a security-software company, swiftly took responsibility and apologized for the incident, which resulted from a software update gone wrong and hit major organizations that use Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing service. The damage is extensive, though temporary. Most major airlines grounded their flights, teeing up days of travel disruptions to come. Some cities’ 911 call centers stopped working. Hospitals were taken offline too.
But what if the next major disruption were the work of America’s primary geopolitical foe? Many analysts believe that China, in the opening move of a direct assault on Taiwan, could, as a preemptive measure, do everything in its power to throw the United States into turmoil.
Washington has taken significant steps to ban the purchase of new Chinese telecom equipment for use in U.S. networks and funded a “rip and replace” program, to convince cellular providers to get rid of it. Still, plenty of equipment from Chinese firms blacklisted by the U.S. government for their ties to Beijing remains in place.
In February, several national-security agencies took action against a Chinese state-sponsored hacking network called Volt Typhoon, which, in their words, had “compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations — primarily in Communications, Energy, Transportation Systems, and Water and Wastewater Systems Sectors.” The agencies said they believed that this was an effort to disrupt those organizations “in the event of potential geopolitical tensions and/or military conflicts.”
Is this threat currently a big enough topic of conversation? It sometimes hits the headlines, as it did when the federal government exposed Volt Typhoon. But generally, no, it’s not.
Earlier this morning, a U.S. IT firm accidentally grounded America’s major airlines, and a few abroad. The disruption will soon be forgotten. But don’t lose sight of what happened this morning. The next time a disruption of this magnitude takes place, it might be the deliberate work of an actor trying to do harm.
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