From: The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 6:39 AM
Subject: The Morning: When computers go dark
To: <sipantichijk@gmail.com>
Good morning. Today, my colleague Steve Lohr explains the threats created by our online, connected world. We're also covering the U.N. General Assembly, Hezbollah and American portion sizes. —David Leonhardt
A brittle network
Two months ago, what should have been a routine software update by a security company, CrowdStrike, crashed millions of computers around the world running Microsoft Windows. Airlines grounded flights. Subways stopped. Operators of 911 lines couldn't dispatch help. Stores shut down. Hospitals canceled surgeries. The chaos, though it lasted only a few days, was telling. New advances make our lives easier, but there are trade-offs. They can vanish quickly — in an outage, a hack or a pandemic. And as the economy has become more dependent on a smaller number of technology companies, we've become more susceptible to hiccups that affect them. American cellphones, for instance, stopped working in Europe for several days in June, stranding many travelers. We're "highly digitized, highly interdependent, highly connected, and highly vulnerable," said Jen Easterly, who leads the Homeland Security Department's agency focused on digital infrastructure. A House hearing yesterday and other government agencies are looking into how an errant sliver of buggy software touched off the CrowdStrike meltdown. This outage was not the work of villainous foreign hackers. Instead, it was simply a reminder of how reliant we are on our tech and the companies that make it. They are corporate paragons of innovation, success and wealth. But every year there are reasons to wonder if they have the incentive or even the capability to be trustworthy stewards of our collective security. Global vulnerabilityThe pandemic taught us a hard-earned lesson: Diversity enhances resilience. Before Covid struck, supply chains were too dependent on China — leading to widespread product shortages when containers full of goods got stuck there. In business technology, Microsoft is a dominant species. Its Windows software controls the basic operations on 1.4 billion machines worldwide — including in hospitals, factories, stores, airports and corporate data centers. The chaos in July unfolded when CrowdStrike's update accidentally tanked an estimated 8.5 million machines running Windows — a large number but a tiny portion of Microsoft's global footprint. "That uniformity brings incredible efficiency, but the bad news is that it also results in incredible brittleness," said Tom Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
The biggest and most valuable companies also carry the most risk to the economy as a whole. They are linked to more users, so if something happens to them, all the people who depend on them suffer. Think of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, which is Google's corporate parent. They are dominant hubs in fields like cloud computing and software, online advertising and e-commerce. If they go down, they can disrupt your daily routines, or your company's. Containing the risksThe ascent of these tech giants is relatively recent. But the danger of concentration in key industries is certainly not. "Systemic risk" is the term used by experts and policymakers. When the 2008 financial crisis struck, governments realized that the systemic risk of big bank failures could imperil whole economies. So regulators rewrote the rules. They identified a group of "systemically important" banks and said that these should be subject to greater scrutiny. They introduced "stress tests" of their resilience to see if they have sufficient funds to withstand market drops, even panics. Similarly, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is developing a list of companies that disproportionately affect national security, economic security and public health and safety. The government is paying closer attention. In 2022, President Biden created the Cyber Safety Review Board, modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates airplane crashes and makes recommendations. This year, it issued a harsh critique of a 2023 intrusion into Microsoft's cloud messaging service by a hacker group linked to the Chinese government. The hackers had gained access to the email accounts of senior U.S. government officials, and the report blamed a "cascade of security failures at Microsoft." It recommended more than a dozen fixes, and Microsoft's president said in June that the company was implementing all of them. Microsoft said the issues identified by the safety panel had no relation to the CrowdStrike outage. The company says it is working to reduce the risk of accidental crashes. One perennial challenge for tech companies is to balance developing new products with protecting the ones they already have. They make most of their money selling new offerings, not fixing old ones. After Delta Air Lines said it had lost $500 million in the CrowdStrike outage — from canceled flights, overtime payments and hotel rooms for stranded passengers — its C.E.O. questioned the priorities of tech giants. Their strategies depend on beating their competitors to the next big thing. "They're building the future," said Ed Bastian, Delta's chief, said, "and they have to make sure they fortify the current," securing the day-to-day machinery of the digital world.
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