Edited excerpts from the book proposals of the three finalists for the 2021 Bracken Bower Prize, backed by the Financial Times and McKinsey.
The Cybersecurity Wake-Up Call
Building resilience in the digital age
BY MANUEL HEPFER
“I’ll never forget it. It was early in the morning when I was woken up at 4am,” said Robert Frazer, chair of a large, international enterprise. (Robert Frazer is not his real name). “A call came from the office that we had suffered a serious cyber attack, which brought our business to a complete standstill. We had to reinstall our entire IT infrastructure — more than 4,000 servers, 50,000 computers, 3,000 applications.”
Robert went on to say: “This cyber attack was a very significant wake-up call for a global company like us — and also a very expensive one. Yet, I argue that it was a very important wake-up call. I hope that our incident can be a wake-up call not just for our company but for everyone who has anything to do with technology, which I presume is every company in the world.”
Robert’s remarks seem to describe an experience with an exceptionally bad cyber attack, but there was nothing unique about it. Devastating cyber attacks happen all the time and any company can fall victim.
The Economist describes the current state of cyber security as a ransomware pandemic. Over a three-week period in May 2021, the world witnessed three high-profile cyber attacks. On May 7, cyber criminals attacked the US pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline, a major artery that supplies almost half the oil to the US East Coast, leading to gasoline shortages and long queues at petrol ..
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