The fragility of strangers
This week, someone you've never met changed the configuration settings on their individual account with a company you've never heard of and knocked out 85% of that company's network. Dumb stuff like this probably happens all the time without attracting attention, but in this case the company, Fastly. is a cloud provider that also runs an intermediary content delivery network intended to speed up Internet connections. Result: people all over the world were unable to reach myriad major Internet sites such as Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, and the Guardian for about an hour.
The proximate cause of these outages, Fastly has now told the world, was a bug that was introduced (note lack of agency) into its software code in mid-May, which laid dormant until someone did something completely normal to trigger it.
In the early days, we all assumed that as more companies came onstream and admins built experience and expertise, this sort of thing would happen less and less. But as the mad complexity of our computer systems and networks continues to increase - Internet of Things! AI! - now it's more likely that stuff like this will also increase, will be harder to debug, and will cause far more ancillary damage - and that damage will not be limited to the virtual world. A single random human, accidentally or intentionally, is now capable of creating physical-world damage at scale.
Ransomware attacks earlier this month illustrate this. Attackers' use of a single leaked password linked to a disused VPN account in the systems that run the Colonial Pipeline compromised gasoline supplies down a large swathe of the US east coast. Near-simultaneously, a ransomware attack on the world's largest meatpacker, JBS, briefly halted production, threatening food security in North America and Australia. In December, an attack on network management software supplied by the previously little-known SolarWinds compromised more than 18,000 companies and government agencies. In all these cases, random strangers reached out across the world and affected millions of personal lives by leveraging a vulnerability inside a company that is not widely known but that provides crucial services to companies we do know and use every day.
An ordinary person just trying to live their life has no defense except to have backups of everything - not just data, but service providers and suppliers. Most people either can't afford that or don't have access to alternatives, which means that precarious lives are made even more so by hidden vulnerabilities they can't assess.
An earlier example: in 2012, journalist Matt Honan's data was entirely wiped out through an attack that leveraged quirks of two unrelated services - Apple and Amazon - against each other to seize control of his email address and delete all his data. Moral: data "in the cloud" is not a backup, even if the hosting company says they keep backups. Second moral: if there is a vulnerability, someone will find it, sometimes for motives you would never guess.
If memory serves, Akamai, founded in 1998, was the first CDN. The idea was that even though the Internet means the death of distance, physics matters. Michael Lewis captured this principle in detail in his book Flash Boys, in which a handful of Wall Street types pay extraordinary amounts to shave a few split-seconds off the time it takes to make a trade by using a ruler and map to send fiber topic cables along the shortest possible route between exchanges. Just so, CDNs cache frequently accessed content on mirror servers around the world. When you call up one of those pages, it, or frequently-used parts of it in the case of dynamically assembled pages, is served up from the nearest of those servers, rather than from the distant originator. By now, there are dozens of these networks and what they do has vastly increased in sophistication, just as the web itself has. A really major outlet like Amazon will have contracts with more than one, but apparently switching from one to the other isn't always easy, and because so many outages are very short it's often easier to wait it out. Not in this case!
At The Conversation, criminology professor David Wall also sees this outage as a sign of the future for the same reason I do: centralization and consolidation have shrunk, and continue to shrink, the number of single points of widespread failure. Yes, the Internet was built to withstand a bomb outage is true - but as we have been writing for 20 years now, this Internet is not that Internet. The path to today's Internet has led from the decentralized era of Usenet, IRC, and own-your-own mail server to web hosting farms to the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Apple, and the AI-dominating Big Nine. In 2013, Edward Snowden's revelations made plain how well that suits surveillance-hungry governments, and it's only gotten worse since, as companies seek to insert themselves into every aspect of our lives - intermediaries that bring us a raft of new insecurities that we have no time or ability to audit.
Increasing complexity, hidden intermediation, increasing numbers of interferers, and increasing scale all add up to a brittle and fragile Internet, onto which we continue to pile all our most critical services and activities. What could possibly go wrong?
Illustrations: Map of the Colonial Pipeline.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.