The biggest threat isn’t a hacker — it’s a fire, flood, or a physical attack. Be sure you have genuine backup and the right kind of redundancy. Baghdad’s telecommunications infrastructure fell silent during the first week of April under a rain of precision-guided bombs. U.S. and British planes targeted phone facilities and other critical pieces of the Iraqi communications infrastructure, mirroring campaigns in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War to isolate the leadership from the levers of power.
CEOs in the U.S. needn’t worry about an F-15 taking out their data connections. And it’s also clear that firewalls, antivirus systems, and other digital protective gear all have their places in the best-laid plans to safeguard a business. That said, the U.S. military chose to use bombs — not hackers — to drop Iraqi networks for a reason. Nothing brings a network to a halt more easily and quickly than physical damage, whether it be from a plane hitting the World Trade Center, massive floods in Texas, or a high-temperature chemical fire on a train passing through a Baltimore tunnel filled with fiber-optic cables. Full Story
