5 Cyber Resilience Lessons We Re-Learned in 2021 (But Will Probably Forget)
The past 12 months were full of painful reminders of the challenges our cybersecurity and cyber resilience efforts face. Here’s a refresher course.
With every year come new extraordinary technological innovations. Some of the most innovative, sadly, come from the minds of cyberattackers. And others help IT teams solve some old problems, but create new ones. But year in and year out, good fundamentals never go out of style.
2021 was no different. Here's a look back at some of the year's most devastating attacks, outages and cyber resilience failures, and the lessons we ought to learn from them (but probably won't).
Beware of Misconfigurations. (And Segment Your Networks, Please.)
For six hours on Oct. 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went dark. Was it a sophisticated cyberattacker orchestrating a sophisticated denial of service? No. It was a simple routing protocol misconfiguration issue, exacerbated by a surprising lack of network segmentation.
Read: 5 Lessons from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Outage: Facebook learned the hard way that a single configuration error can take down the mightiest of networks. Here are a few things that can help enterprises avoid making the same mistake.
Read (from Network Computing): BGP Config Change, Not Cyber Attack, Brought Down Facebook: Enterprise IT takeaways from the Facebook outage: Tread carefully when making BGP config changes and avoid putting everything (DNS, apps, and more) on one network.