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- The recent SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline hacks were caused by achingly bad security practices.
- To prevent a real catastrophe, American companies need to revamp their IT systems.
- For some companies, this can be a big hurdle, but the potential alternative makes it well worth the effort.
- Michael Abboud is founder and CEO of TetherView, a leading Private Cloud provider.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Right now, the people in charge of very important pieces of our national infrastructure are bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to a room full of preschoolers wandering around with sharp, pointy scissors.
The SolarWinds breach earlier this year, considered the largest in the world to date, is said to have resulted from an intern using an incredibly simple and easily guessable password: “solarwinds123”. The hackers didn’t have to do any “hacking” to execute their breach. They just walked in the metaphorical front door and sat in the living room for 18 months without anybody knowing they were there.
Meanwhile, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, which abruptly stoppered the flow of fuel through one of the country’s most important arteries, didn’t happen because the hackers got access to the systems that actually control the pipeline. Instead, the hackers simply targeted the company’s business systems, which had…
