CYBERSECURITY: Is a "fire sale" possible given what happened in Crowdstrike & Azure global IT outage? I explore the potential of this happening.
In the context of hacking and cybersecurity, a "fire sale" refers to a coordinated, multi-stage cyber attack intended to disrupt and compromise multiple critical infrastructure systems, often with catastrophic effects.
The term gained popularity from the 2007 movie "Live Free or Die Hard," where the plot centers around such an attack.
A fire sale typically involves three phases:
1. Disruption of Transportation Systems: Attacks on traffic signals, railways, and air traffic control to create chaos and confusion.
2. Financial Systems Attack: Targeting banks, stock markets, and other financial institutions to cripple the economy.
3. Utilities and Communication Attack: Disabling utilities like electricity, water, and telecommunications to further exacerbate the crisis.
The goal of a fire sale is to create widespread panic and chaos by systematically crippling key infrastructure elements. While this is a fictional concept, it underscores the importance of robust cybersecurity measures to protect critical systems from sophisticated and coordinated attacks.
Given what happened with Crowdstrike and at same time Microsoft Azure had major outages seperate to Crowdstrike it may encourage further multi-pronged attacks. It may spur malicious hackers and hardline states that use malicious hacking to plan and undertake multi-staged attacks with careful planning and staged execution in the future.
There is increasing reports that state backed malicious hackers are quietly positioning themselves in critical assets and laying low undetected and ready for when a fire sale is ready for activation eg in case of a Taiwan war or something else.
AI Could Bring About a Global IT Outage
I think generative AI in the hands of hackers as it gets smarter and smarter AI will be built release into different parts of the world and potentially create the possibility of a fire sale where everything must go and everything gets attacked.
Particularly, hardline states have had a desire to inflict fear on the western populations to show that their style of government is better and their lifestyle is better. I'm not going to judge whether this type of lifestyle or that type of lifestyle is better. The one thing is clear. Everyone should be able to choose how they live as long as they don't refer to anyone. Rest is personal choice and faith-based options.
The potentiality of AI coming in and being designed on the next intelligence level like reasoning and creativity and having that combined with hackers intention to inflict damage and find vulnerabilities and access critical areas could cause entire governments to shut down and cause fear in the public similar to the movie I mentioned.
Conclusion
All governments, citizens and organizations must stay vigilant and do proper monitoring relevant to their target value.
Constantly innovating and matching the veracity and advanced AI that hackers might create all governments and developers need to work together to stay one step ahead of malicious hackers in developing intelligent AI defence systems. And having offensive attack AI designed just like as if it's a human and multiply them by hundreds of thousands of instances to defend a country and an organisation for example. That I think is the future of cyber defence in the light of the possibility of a fire sale.
And of course, the usual advice for developers is to carefully test their code in simulated environments before releasing it automatically to the world. And then careful and Street security around developing because if malicious code is inserted by malicious developer within the organisation or government then were all in trouble.
Stay safe online.
