ReGen Strategic
My first reaction to Friday’s global IT outage was that the millennium bug had finally struck.
After putting my Gen X cynicism behind me, my mind quickly went to the possibility of cyber-attack.
We now know that the outage was caused by a faulty update for Microsoft systems by US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
On Friday, I was on my way back from Singapore, after talking with students at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) about sustainability the day before, during which we discussed cybersecurity as an ESG issue. While I wasn’t able to finalise my hotel bill, Qantas had resolved the impacts of the outage by the time I checked in and I had a smooth journey home.
But, the impacts of the outage extended well beyond hotels and air travel and provide us with an insight into what the economic, social and environmental impacts of any future large scale cyber-attack may be.
The economic loss to businesses from a day of not being able to trade. The health impacts resulting from hospitals being unable to process admissions, surgeries and discharges. The volume of energy consumed by computers working overtime around the world to address the issues. Then there are the stakeholder issues for all concerned.
While there were some at the time who thought Y2K was a beat up, majority opinion is that issues were avoided as a result of good planning by government and industry in the late 1990s.
With human activity now more heavily dependent on computing systems, the level of planning required to avoid and respond to systems risks is even more important.
This article also appeared in The West Australian newspaper.