Last week I theorized about the coming of The Big One, the cyberquake that will count as a real megascale global online disaster to the online world. Reader Dave Kaplan wrote, “Thanks for the extra stress about horrific events I have no control over. . . . This may be the soft, white underbelly of our civilization.”
Last week I theorized about the coming of The Big One, the cyberquake that will count as a real megascale global online disaster to the online world.
Reader Dave Kaplan wrote, “Thanks for the extra stress about horrific events I have no control over. . . . This may be the soft, white underbelly of our civilization.”
Some of you apparently think that I meant the entire ‘Net will be wiped out. Not so. Just as the 1918 influenza pandemic didn’t annihilate the human race, nor will the Big One annihilate the Internet.
But what the Big One will do is cause such damage that it will be incontrovertibly a disaster. All we need is, for example, a worm implementing a pre-SP1 Windows XP zero-day exploit carried by e-mail that goes undetected for 90 days before it wipes all disks it can see. Voilà! A full-fledged disaster.
I received a letter from reader Tim Matson expressing a view that some of you might share: “I read articles every week from experts around the world who say that the Big One is just around the corner. . . . All of the IT columnists screaming at the top of their collective lungs isn’t going to convince my CEO or me that we should spend a lot of money on responding to the end of cyber [life] on this planet. If you don’t have a solution or at least some idea of what the problem is, then find something else to fill your column with.”
I think I’ve adequately discussed the kind of things that might constitute the problem, but you are correct, Tim, I don’t have a general solution. That’s something that each company has to consider. It isn’t hard: Look at your disaster and recovery plan and figure out whether the disasters you’ve considered are of the same scale as the Big One.
I’m trying to get you thinking about the worst worst-case scenario rather than the best worst-case scenario, which is what most companies plan for.
Some of you wrote suggesting that, like disease and ecological disasters in the biological world, the inherent heterogeneity of the Internet will provide “insulation” that will save us from disaster.
This position was put forward by reader Mark Cowther: “You can put me in the camp that does not think an IT Big One is inevitable. … I see computer networks as a biologist views life. If a virus kills off the weaker systems, then so be it. I have always advocated a mixed environment. . . . Some systems may get hit, but not all.”
Reader Joe Fernandez agreed: “If there is homogeneity and centralization, there is vulnerability to a total wipeout by a single catastrophic event. If you have diversity of species and a distribution of the members, you get resilience.”
Sure, if Linux and Macs didn’t exist the Big One would be far more likely, but I have to disagree that we have anything even close to enough diversity. In reality, the majority of Internet-connected systems are remarkably similar in many important ways and the spectrum of differences too narrow for the parallel with biology to be practically effective.
But it does seem that some of you, however, already plan to not be part of the disaster. Reader Edward Fitch wrote, “There are a few of us that have PCs that are not connected to the Internet, [have] implemented secure computing and [limited] things to such an extent that only text can get through, with multiple layers of operating systems … that would probably survive almost anything.”
Way to go, Edward.
Are your survival plans as good as Edward’s? Confessions to backspin@gibbs.com.
