Cyber-Attack on an American City
I don’t know how many of you saw this article, but a cyber-attack on the electronic infrastructure of Morgan Hill, California took place April 9. Not only is it shocking at how little press this incident has received, it is also frightening when you consider how easy it was to accomplish, and the breadth of the outages.
Okay. In all fairness, I get a little restless if I can't check my email on a regular basis. And more and more I am becoming fond of checking Facebook, Twitter and my fantasy baseball status any time day or night. So what’s the big deal if I have to go a couple of days without it?
As it turns out, that is only a small part of the story. Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL, internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals and monitoring of critical utilities. Even services that shouldn’t have failed such as the local hospital’s internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a “paper system” for the day.
Commerce was significantly disrupted for a couple of days and some negative impact to agricultural operations took place, but fortunately, Morgan Hill came out of this without any terrible consequences. In fact, because they had an active emergency management plan and a great relationship with the local ham radio operators combined with their rural status, they came out of it pretty well.
So what was the purpose of the attack? Bank robbery, stock market manipulation, disgruntled employees or simply to teach us a lesson? At this point, we don’t really know. Perhaps more will be revealed in the coming weeks. Hopefully more will be revealed in the coming weeks.
It’s hard to say what impact if any this will have in the long term. It certainly raises questions about maintaining centralized services, cloud computing and regular testing of disaster plans. In these troubled financial times, this is sure to increase the costs of municipal services. In fact, it will very likely increase the costs of all IT services from the public, private and non-profit sectors across the board.
To full article can be accessed at here.
Scott
Okay. In all fairness, I get a little restless if I can't check my email on a regular basis. And more and more I am becoming fond of checking Facebook, Twitter and my fantasy baseball status any time day or night. So what’s the big deal if I have to go a couple of days without it?
As it turns out, that is only a small part of the story. Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL, internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals and monitoring of critical utilities. Even services that shouldn’t have failed such as the local hospital’s internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a “paper system” for the day.
Commerce was significantly disrupted for a couple of days and some negative impact to agricultural operations took place, but fortunately, Morgan Hill came out of this without any terrible consequences. In fact, because they had an active emergency management plan and a great relationship with the local ham radio operators combined with their rural status, they came out of it pretty well.
So what was the purpose of the attack? Bank robbery, stock market manipulation, disgruntled employees or simply to teach us a lesson? At this point, we don’t really know. Perhaps more will be revealed in the coming weeks. Hopefully more will be revealed in the coming weeks.
It’s hard to say what impact if any this will have in the long term. It certainly raises questions about maintaining centralized services, cloud computing and regular testing of disaster plans. In these troubled financial times, this is sure to increase the costs of municipal services. In fact, it will very likely increase the costs of all IT services from the public, private and non-profit sectors across the board.
To full article can be accessed at here.
Scott
Category Notes Threats
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Comments
Posted by Jaime At 05:31:30 PM On 04/27/2009 | - Website - |
Thanks for the comments.
Posted by Scott Johnsen At 06:22:50 PM On 04/27/2009 | - Website - |