You think you’ve got your cybersecurity down pat. Antivirus is old news, firewalls have been reheated many times, perimeter integrity has been moved to account for a mobile perimeter – and then some hairy little beast bites through a data cable and the critical systems are down again.
Yes, as we reported last year, the Cyber Squirrel 1 project has uncovered yet more examples of natural data outage. And the main culprit of these disruptions is… there’s a clue in the name… the squirrel.
That said, there are other miscreants among the fauna reported once again by researcher Cris “Space Rogue” Thomas. Squirrels launched 879 attacks over the last year, birds were responsible for around half of that figure, snakes hit installations 83 times.
For all that, our favourite statistic has to be the fact that three outages were caused by frogs. In our experience frogs are rarely blessed with razor-sharp teeth; we’d half-way love to know what exactly they did to cause a problem. The other half suspects it didn’t end well for the frog. In the intervening year, not necessarily related to the same research, we reported on a wombat attack in Australia.
Thompson has been following the exploits of the animal kingdom vs technology for some time – Naked Security first reported on the issue one year ago. At that point the ratio of human-originated attacks to squirrel-related incidents was 800-1; according to his latest research it is now 1800-3.
Thomas is on record as stating his objective as to expose the “hype” around human-originated cybersecurity threats. We can’t quite see them in the same league as Stuxnet, and we’d urge readers to continue to implement industrial controls regardless.
Mike
Most likely the frogs caused a short circuit.
As a user of rural broadband, I’ve seen a number of intermittent faults where the outage is caused by something going back to its nest inside a telecoms cabinet. While it’s out in the daytime everything works fine.
Bryan
Twice now in my current location I’ve had intermittent broadband fail during the day and return late at night. Always in summer, the gear either has loose connections or overheated equipment that expands in the daily desert temperatures only to resume operations once it’s about bedtime
:-/
Bacchalia
Snail mail is also vulnerable. Some years ago I had package of documents damaged, and annotated “eaten by snails”
Mike
All technology is vulnerable to wild animals.
Even Dr Doom was defeated by squirrels.
Joanna
Thank you for enlightening us regarding how wildlife can cause a data outage. Good to know information.