This interesting post ‘The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and the SolarWinds hack were all but inevitable – why national cyber defense is a ‘wicked’ problem‘ shows how difficult it can be to protect national infrastructure against hacking, in particular in a context of globalization of IT outsourcing.
One of the important observations from the post is the realization that security threats are created through widespread subcontracting of IT work to external parties, often in developing or emerging nations. For example “SolarWinds, driven by its growth strategy and plans to spin off its managed service provider business in 2021, bears much of the responsibility for the damage, according to cybersecurity experts. I believe that the company put itself at risk by outsourcing its software development to Eastern Europe, including a company in Belarus. Russian operatives have been known to use companies in former Soviet satellite countries to insert malware into software supply chains.”
In addition, national agencies in charge of defending essential infrastructure are not always coordinated or integrated, and it is extremely difficult to check out all the various services used to manage IT infrastructure.
Resilience to hacking requires solving an issue in a complex situation, and this requires novel approaches are that more systemic than the ones applied currently. Moreover it is important to increase infrastructure resilience to events which may be up to some level unavoidable.
