Global IT Outage Hits But Is It A Surprise?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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Prominent security consultant Troy Hunt said today: 'this will be the largest IT outage in history.’ And according to live coverage by the BBC:

• Major IT outages are hitting industries across the world, with airlines, broadcasters and supermarkets affected

• American Airlines says none of its flights are taking off and the problems are due to an issue with Crowdstrike cybersecurity software

• Microsoft says it is taking mitigation action, but the cause of the outage hasn't been confirmed

• In the UK, train companies report delays and some GP surgeries in England are having issues with booking appointments

• Sky News has not been able to broadcast live, its executive chairman says

What is remarkably prescient is the June 1, 2020 article prepared by the World Economic Forum’s Centre of Cybersecurity with its dire warning of a “global cyber pandemic.” The following extract is taken from the WEF’s website.

COVID-19 is not the only risk with the ability to quickly and exponentially disrupt the way we live. The crisis shows that the world is far more prone to disturbance by pandemics, cyberattacks or environmental tipping points than history indicates.

Our "new normal" isn’t COVID-19 itself – it's COVID-like incidents.

And a cyber pandemic is probably as inevitable as a future disease pandemic. The time to start thinking about the response is – as always – yesterday.

To start that process, it’s important to examine the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic ­– and use them to prepare for a future global cyberattack.

Lesson #1: A cyberattack with characteristics similar to the coronavirus would spread faster and further than any biological virus.

The reproductive rate – or R0 – of COVID-19 is somewhere between two and three without any social distancing, which means every infected person passes the virus to a couple of other people. This number affects how fast a virus can spread; the number of infected people in New York state was doubling every three days before lockdown.

By contrast, estimates of R0 of cyberattacks are 27 and above. One of the fastest worms in history, the 2003 Slammer/Sapphire worm, doubled in size approximately every 8.5 seconds, spreading to over 75,000 infected devices in 10 minutes and 10.8 million devices in 24 hours. The 2017 WannaCry attack exploited a vulnerability in older Windows systems to cripple more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries; it was halted by emergency patches and the accidental discovery of a “kill switch”.

The cyber equivalent of COVID-19 would be a self-propagating attack using one or more “zero-day” exploits, techniques for which patches and specific antivirus software signatures are not yet available. Most likely, it would attack all devices running a single, common operating system or application.

Since zero-day attacks are rarely discovered right away – Stuxnet used four separate zero-day exploits and hid in systems for 18 months before attacking – it would take a while to identify the virus and even longer to stop it from spreading. If the vector were a popular social networking application with, say, 2 billion users, a virus with a reproductive rate of 20 may take five days to infect over 1 billion devices.

Lesson #2: The economic impact of a widespread digital shutdown would be of the same magnitude – or greater – than what we’re currently seeing.

If cyber-COVID mirrored the pathology of the novel coronavirus, 30% of infected systems would be asymptomatic and spread the virus, while half would continue functioning with performance severely degraded – the digital equivalent of being in bed for a week. Meanwhile 15% would be “wiped” with total data loss, requiring a complete system reinstall. Finally, 5% would be “bricked” – rendering the device itself inoperable.

The end result: millions of devices would be taken offline in a matter of days.

The only way to stop the exponential propagation of cyber-COVID would be to fully disconnect all vulnerable devices from one another and the internet to avoid infection. The whole world could experience cyber lockdown until a digital vaccine was developed. All business communication and data transfers would be blocked. Social contact would be reduced to people contactable by in-person visits, copper landline, snail-mail or short-wave radio.

A single day without the internet would cost the world more than $50 billion. A 21-day global cyber lockdown could cost over $1 trillion…

It is interesting how the WEF vividly describe the crisis of a global cyberattack in the same terms as a viral pandemic- similar to Covid in fact but worse.

A cyberattack with characteristics similar to the coronavirus would spread faster and further than any biological virus.

The solution to the crisis they declare would be a “digital vaccine” but until that is developed, in the interim a “cyber lockdown” would be experienced by the whole world.

Wow, what foresight!

It’s hard to forget or even fully grasp how the world was plunged into lockdown until the experimental gene-based “vaccines” heralded as “safe and effective” was seen as the only way out of the Covid pandemic.

The WEF’s rhetoric does lead one to believe that this globalist organization appears to adhere to the theory: Don’t ever let a good crisis go to waste!

The WEF is funded primarily through membership fees. These are paid by the world's largest and most influential corporations, such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. Various governments and philanthropic organizations pay their fair share too, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockerfeller Foundation.

What do these organizations have in common?

Well, they all in someway financially benefited from the mass rollout of unprecendented bio-security countermeasures the world has ever seen, such as the lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

How to prepare for the inevitable global cyberattack?

According to the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity:

COVID-19 has revealed the importance of international, cross-stakeholder coordination. Cooperation between public and private sector leaders is also critical, particularly when it comes to mitigation. The Centre for Cybersecurity at the World Economic Forum is just one example of an organization addressing systemic cybersecurity challenges and improving digital trust across institutions, businesses and individuals.

The “importance of international, cross-stakeholder coordination” is seen as critical “when it comes to mitigation.” A parallel can easily be drawn in how many countries followed the same lockstep policies to ‘mitigate’ the spread of Covid.

It is interesting how this ‘international coordination’ comes in the form of the WEF’s brainchild: ‘The Centre for Cybersecurity’ which is described as an “independent and impartial platform to reinforce the importance of cybersecurity as a strategic priority and drive global public-private action to address systemic cybersecurity challenges.”

This uncannily resembles the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty with its deeply centralised and coordinated approach in how member states need to respond to the challenges of pandemics or even the threat of one. Its apparent aim is to strengthen global health security, ensuring a more coordinated response to future pandemics.

Another theme that both these initiatives have in common is that they arise out of the ‘shortcomings exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic’- the hard lessons that needed to be learned.

Will today’s IT outage become the “new normal” or a “Covid-like incident?” Let’s wait and see. One thing that is inevitable- the global elites will undoubtedly have the solution to the crisis.

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