Stuart Millar
The attacks on New York and Washington will force organisations to rethink their computer security procedures, experts predicted.
Society’s growing reliance on computers and communication technology makes it more vulnerable if systems are wiped out.
But according to @stake, the world’s biggest independent security consultancy, the majority of organisations do not have adequate protection.
Despite the devastation in New York and the complete destruction of the offices of some of the world’s biggest banks, the financial system has been safeguarded because most of the businesses had designed adequate emergency back-up plans.
The banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, have been able to transfer operations to other sites in New York and have begun channelling transactions to offices in Europe and the Far East.
All their data, including transactions, will have been automatically stored on back-up tapes which will have been kept at secure locations.
But Royal Hansen, @stake’s European practice director, said many organisations had yet to realise the need for proper protection: “Tuesday’s events will focus minds. Although most companies have become almost totally reliant on technology, they have never thought of themselves as targets so they haven’t bothered building resilience into their systems. Hopefully they will have learned their lesson.”
The Internet appears to have survived the attacks unscathed. On Tuesday there were fears that it would be brought to its knees by the combination of the destruction of New York’s telephone infrastructure and massive increase in traffic as people desperately tried to contact relatives or access news sites for the latest information.
Although access to many news sites was slower about 13 seconds compared with the normal average of five analysts said that Internet servers, even those located on the east coast of the United States, performed well in the wake of the attacks.
This is because it has been designed, since its earliest incarnation as a military communications network, to be immune to the loss of individual parts of the network. If a server in one area of the network goes down, the information is automatically diverted via other routes. “In many ways, this is a tribute to the organic nature of the Internet,” said Hansen.