Besides never-ending culture war provocations and French officials’ inexplicable dedication to persuading the world that the Seine River is not, in fact, an open sewer, the most interesting news out of the 2024 summer Olympics involves repeated attacks on France’s infrastructure. Coming so soon after the chaos created by the CrowdStrike fiasco, it underlines the vulnerability of so much of modern society, even amidst heightened security.
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Acts of Malice and Incompetence
“France’s high-speed rail network was hit by ‘malicious acts’ including arson attacks that have disrupted the transport system, train operator SNCF said Friday, hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics,” France24 reported last week. “The disruptions as the world’s eye was turning to Paris were expected to affect a quarter of a million people on Friday and endure through the weekend, and possibly longer, officials said.”
French authorities were already beginning to point their fingers at “far-left extremists” who have targeted the rail network in the past when the country’s data networks were attacked just days later.
“The French government says multiple telecommunications lines have been hit by acts of vandalism, affecting fiber lines and fixed and mobile phone lines as cities around France are hosting events for the 2024 Paris Olympics,” according to Le Monde.
Whether the two attacks were related remains uncertain, though that seems likely. But with 20,000 troops deployed alongside 40,000 police officers for the Olympics, the incidents illustrate how hard it is to secure the modern, interconnected world when bad actors can cause damage by striking from beyond the security perimeters. They also highlight, coming so soon after the CrowdStrike mess, the fragility of the systems on which we depend, whether the threat is from malice or incompetence.
“A bad software update from security software vendor CrowdStrike has paralyzed Windows machines around the world,” CSO noted on July 19. “The problem, apparently affecting its Falcon platform, brought down servers at airlines, locked up computers at banks, and hurt healthcare services.”
Businesses, organizations, and government agencies are still cleaning up from the aftermath, which is ultimately projected to carry a price tag in the billions of dollars. During the outage, many operations were unable to process credit cards and people were reduced to paying in cash—if they had any. Flights were grounded and medical procedures were canceled as data on servers became unavailable. It was a return to business as done decades in the past for people who, in many cases, no longer have the equipment, physical money, or paper records to adjust accordingly.
When the Modern World Runs Through a Single Cable
Those of us in northern Arizona had a taste of that world in 2015 when somebody—still uncaught, so far as I can tell—cut through the fiber-optic cable that carried the 21st century to our piece of the planet.
“Businesses couldn’t process credit card transactions, ATMs didn’t function, law enforcement databases were unavailable, and even weather reports were affected in an area stretching from north of Phoenix to Flagstaff, about 100 miles away,” CBS News reported at the time.
The outage lasted just hours, providing a relatively harmless warning of what could happen. As Felicia Fonseca wrote for the AP, it “did more than underscore just how dependent modern society has become on high technology. It raised questions about the vulnerability of the nation’s Internet infrastructure.”
Cables in the tech-heavy San Francisco area have suffered many such attacks.
The CrowdStrike mess suggests data networks are still vulnerable, whether to saboteurs or to sloppy code. For Wired, Caroline Haskins observed that “many businesses were faced with a choice: Go cash-only or close until systems came back online.” In Australia’s BrokerDaily, Jack Campbell observed that “CrowdStrike outages that affected systems across the world have some questioning digital banking.”
Vulnerable Systems in a Hostile World
That’s a timely rethink given the attacks on the rail and, particularly, the fiber-optic networks in France—especially given that just days before the Olympics opened, authorities arrested Paris-based Russian chef/FSB spy Kirill Gryaznov for plotting to disrupt the opening ceremonies on behalf of his handlers in Moscow. That he was caught because he got drunk and publicly boasted of his mission would be laughable if much of the world hadn’t just been brought to its knees because a computer security company didn’t properly test its latest software update.
Adding weight to the arrest is that Russia and the West are engaged in a not-so-quiet sabotage war.
“In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent,” The Economist noted May 12. “Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted.”
International tensions aren’t exactly cooling down at the moment. And here we are with France suffering two attacks seemingly timed to disrupt the Olympics.
As the CrowdStrike incident and my 2015 experience underline, the U.S. is as exposed as France. Not only are data networks subject to disruption, but the power grid that keeps it all running is beyond rickety. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Smith emphasized that “despite federal orders to secure the power grid, tens of thousands of substations are still vulnerable to saboteurs.”
It’s all enough to suggest the modern world is built on a foundation of shifting sand—and some people are actively working to erode its stability. We enjoy the convenience of electricity at the flick of a switch, data at our fingertips, and a connected world. But unless we make backup plans for when those connections go away, whether from mishap, incompetence, or malice, we leave ourselves at risk in a world that offers so much on demand but could take it away in an instant.
Let’s enjoy our conveniences. But let’s also make sure we’re not completely helpless when, inevitably, they become unavailable.