Ever give much thought to cyber-attack? A lot of us are at least familiar with the concept but would we know one if we experienced it?
As an emergency manager, one of the things I really worry about is the slow-onset disaster - the event that starts low key and progresses so slowly that by the time you recognize something is happening, you're already behind the power curve. Training yourself to anticipate this kind of disaster means you sometimes come across as a bit paranoid.
So what's this got to do with cyber-attack? Consider the following:
- On September 13, Chase bank experienced problems with it's website after software from a third–party database company corrupted information in its systems causing over two days of downtime and affecting millions of customers. Chase stated that this was a technical error.
- On September 17, American Express suffered a systems outage. This was nothing major and the system was soon restored.
So, was this just a coincidence that two major financial institutions suffer outages within days of each other? That's certainly possible. Or is something more insidious going on here?
I guess it really depends on your level of paranoia.
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