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posted by LaminatorX on Friday October 31 2014, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the unplugging-the-rack-so-you-can-vaccuum dept.

Forget cyber-espionage, cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism. The biggest threat to Europe’s infrastructure cybersecurity are power outages and poor communication.

On Thursday, ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) held its biggest ever cybersecurity exercise involving more than 200 organisations and 400 cyber-security professionals from 29 European countries.

The bi-annual event simulates a lifelike attack, modelled on real events, to test the reaction of national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTS), government ministries, telco companies, energy companies, financial institutions and internet service providers.

But Steve Purser, Head of Operations at ENISA explained: “The biggest threats we really see are not attacks, but hardware and software failures.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/30/the_threats_to_europes_cybersecurity_arent_what_you_think_they_are/

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:15PM (#111845)

    When a Debian installation that worked fine for many years unintentionally gets systemd installed without warning during a routine update, and then fails to boot properly, is that the kind of "software failure" that they're talking about here?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @02:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @02:50PM (#111920)

      You need to get a handle on your obsession, dude.

      Why not just switch to FreeBSD?

      • (Score: 2) by mtrycz on Friday October 31 2014, @03:56PM

        by mtrycz (60) on Friday October 31 2014, @03:56PM (#111937)

        systemd is deliberately incompatible with BSD, so I think OpenBSD is becoming an option.

        Just hope they won't port that shit to android.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by zzw30 on Friday October 31 2014, @03:46PM

    by zzw30 (4576) on Friday October 31 2014, @03:46PM (#111934)

    I skimmed through that twice, and while I haven't had my coffee yet, it sure seemed like nothing in the rest of the article supported the premise stated at the beginning and quoted in the blurb here. "The biggest threats are power outages and lack of communication... here's a description of how they're testing things this year that has nothing to do with power outages or communication" Um... what? Where's the information supporting that first part? That's the thing I went there to read.

  • (Score: 2) by DrMag on Friday October 31 2014, @05:21PM

    by DrMag (1860) on Friday October 31 2014, @05:21PM (#111954)

    All this conclusion tells me is that the prime targets for attack are those that shut down infrastructure. We've become far to reliant on computers to handle everything for us, and when the power goes out we run into a panic. Having to live now in an area that experiences frequent power outages (and having grown up in a fairly rural area so that lack of power is only a minor inconvenience for me), the hysteria is a little annoying.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @05:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @05:42AM (#112125)

    Often people think that a sudden disaster poses the greatest risk while in fact the everyday humdrum is the killer. It's what happens 99% of the time and with poor policies in place it causes massive damage every single day.

    Regarding cybersecurity I would say widespread monocultures of proprietary software pose the gravest threat.