The fragility of the internet is a threat to the economy
The sheer frequency of the web's problems shows industries, in aggregate, do
not take the issue seriously
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/10/21/commentary/world-commentary/fragile-internet/
by Tae Kim
Bloomberg
Oct 21, 2021
It has been a rough few months for the internet.
In June, Fastly Inc.’s content-delivery network failure forced some of the
world’s biggest e-commerce and media websites offline. Later, there were
massive data breaches at T-Mobile U.S. Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch
streaming service. And just recently, Facebook Inc.’s main social network,
Instagram and WhatsApp were down for about six hours. Then it happened again —
albeit more briefly.
All the incidents had a common corporate response. It goes something like this:
We are sorry, it was an unintentional configuration error, we’ll do better next
time! After Facebook’s outage, the engineering director at security software
firm Cloudflare Inc. called it a reminder about the fragile nature of internet,
where millions of interconnected systems are dependent on each other to make it
work.
There was a time in the early days of the web when these excuses would be
acceptable. But the internet, and many of these companies, now constitute the
backbone of the modern economy. Billions of consumers and millions of small
businesses rely on Facebook’s communication tools for daily living. If the web
is held together by rubber bands and toothpicks, it’s clear that the U.S. needs
to take urgent action to mitigate those vulnerabilities.
What can be done? First, we should hold companies accountable when they fail to
implement proper safeguards and security policies. The sheer frequency of the
problems shows the industry, in aggregate, doesn’t take the issue seriously.
Companies don’t prioritize the problem or invest enough to fix it. That’s why
it’s important to make negligence much more painful by raising the size of
financial penalties and increasing the liabilities for management teams.
T-Mobile is one of the most egregious examples. According to the Wall Street
Journal, a self-proclaimed hacker said he was able to get inside the wireless
carrier’s systems through an unprotected router, with devastating consequences.
The company revealed in August that personal data for nearly 50 million
accounts were compromised — including some Social Security numbers and driver’s
licenses. Incredibly, this last incident is T-Mobile’s fifth data breach over
roughly the last three years.
Another possible fix would be to increase governmental oversight. With Facebook
and Fastly saying their outages were based on simple employee errors, I shudder
to consider the level of damage a rogue employee or a state-sponsored actor
could cause.
Similar to how the Federal Reserve’s bank examiners aim to prevent systemic
risk by working on-site at financial institutions, a new team of regulators
should get authority to inspect key technology companies’ redundancy and
security plans. At a minimum, we need to do whatever it takes to reduce future
human network configuration errors.
Yes, the Biden administration has acknowledged the importance of the country’s
internet vulnerabilities on national security and economy security grounds. But
thus far, the White House has not done much to closely regulate the private
sector other than to develop voluntary standards. Governments need to be more
forceful.
We can’t keep letting companies off the hook. There’s much to be done to
prevent the worst-case scenario from becoming a reality.
Tae Kim is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.--
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