A critical civilian system goes down \u2013 it\u2019s a scenario that evokes some apocalyptic pictures of destruction and mayhem; remember, for instance, \u201cDie Hard 4.0\u201d? A group of motivated hackers try hacking into government and commercial computers, and bring down all traffic lights in a major city. Unsettling. Actually, every business has its own sort of \u201ccritical\u201d system that\u2019s necessary for its continuous existence. It should be well defended as well as resilient to threats. Architectural errors may diminish this resilience heavily.<\/p>\n
Threatpost ran an article<\/a> on an incident in April with one of the mainstays of American society \u2013 911 service.<\/p>\n A critical civilian system goes down \u2013 apocalypse now? #security<\/p>Tweet<\/a><\/blockquote>\n \u201cIn the early hours of April 10, a series of errors led to a massive, multi-state outage in the emergency call management centers (ECMCs) that handle 911 calls in seven geographically dispersed states. The incident originated at an obscure but critical call routing hub in Englewood, Colo., and ended up knocking out the emergency communication infrastructure for more than 11 million citizens\u201d, wrote Brian Donohue at Threatpost. Well, this sounds bad. 911 service is a critical system that\u2019s supposed to be working ceaselessly. An outage as massive as this that affects (possibly) 3.5% of the US population is a clear emergency. During the outage 87% of the 911 calls made during this outage failed; it seems like a miracle that there were no deaths as a result.<\/p>\n